F is for Forget self-improvement?

Lifehacker by way of Deliberatism.com posted an article about focusing on the small as a methodology for completing the large.  If you read the comments back and forth on the post (not lifehackers) you see quite a range of responses attacking the underlying dogma that you should enjoy the steps you are taking not just the outcome.  There is a focus on outcomes, and the accolades of having completed something (run a marathon, wrote a book, ect.) that undermines the joy in the small steps to get there.  A runner that actually enjoyed running (for themselves no other reward needed) and wanted to run a marathon as an extension of that.  A person that loved word play and used a novel as a vehicle for that.  Now enjoying the small doesn't mean that you might not suffer in these small steps, but rather you enjoyed the struggle as well as the outcome.

I realize this is a stretch for F, but this stupid thing has been in my drafts for longer than I like and I feel like there is some meat to this idea.  I'm not sure if there is a simple set of concrete steps for people to follow but it strongly reminds me of the sensation I walked away from when someone gave me a book about the 8 fold path.  I wish I could remember the name of the book, I sort of disregarded it at the time (I was a college kid handed a book by what I think was a Hare Krishna in an airport).  Any how I think the author's point was about right intention, and perusing things that will make you happy not impress others.

SAN Managment

F*CKSTICKS I was working with my ISCSI SAN yesterday because one of the volumes was getting full (seriously why does everyone save so much data) and I needed to delete an unused volume and use that space to expand the nearly full one.  Well genius boy over here deleted the live one.  ISCSI is really sticky so even though the volume is deleted it is still serving data and let me restore from the Friday backup to the new larger volume and overnight I remapped the shares to the restored files and started syncing the two.

Net result no one but me will know, but there is nothing like the rush of pure adrenaline when you realize you just deleted 300gigs of users data at 3pm!  Sweet Jesus thank you so much for LTO4 Tape drives, I restored at 1.5gb/m so restoring 300 gigs was only about 3 hours but either way I'm exhausted and not going to be in charge of making any decisions today.

Tazer Ball

Someone somewhere just found the shortcut to getting a Darwin Award.

brain melt #1 of the day

Have you seen those negative image tests where you stair at an image and then look away to still see them?  Well this one is more awesome than most you've probably seen.  It's a negative and when you blink you see the image in color.  Give it a try I was pretty floored. Stare at the colored dots on the girl's nose in the photo above for 30 seconds. Then look at a white surface (blank browser, mayhaps) and start blinking.

via Gizmodo

exactly this.

I don't understand ostensibly sane people and the end of the world garbage.  Freak out, but I predict a precipitous drop off in the talk about the Mayans sometime around December 22, also when is there a time that isn't appropriate to drop an XKCD link? Just saying.

Questionable Content AI bill of rights

I read a lot on the internet.  Probably more than is healthy, but every now and then you stumble on something really unique and passionate.  One of the comics that I follow is Questionable Content, and it has it's moments of mindlessness and others of angst, but the author wrote out this whole speech as support to a comic that he drew.  He envisioned a world with an AI, and envisioned what it would be like to live side by side with that AI and wrote a speech about equal rights.

I thought it was pretty interesting, I hope you enjoy the comic.

Holy swollen throat batman

Yesterday was a total wash for me, and I hope tomorrow is a better one.  First we have all staff meetings with the yearly instruction on how to effectively sexually (or otherwise) harass you co-workers and a recognition lunch.  Well you would think it being my 5 year anniversary I would be excited to get my little attaboy plaque to hang up, but instead something in my lunch tried to kill me.  2 sweet benadryl later and give or take some EMT's and my building's security officers standing around watching if I'm going to kick off or live to see another day and I decided to go home rather than slip into a benadryl coma at my desk.

So in short Fuck you Fennel (I think it's the fennel otherwise fuck you mystery allergen).

500 Actual Posts!

So time for me to revel in some sort of a personal accomplishment here.

This dear reader will be my 500th post!  I thought I had passed it before, but that is because the new blogger interface is kind of confusing.   The short story is that I had 500 posts and drafts the last time, now it is 500 honest to goodness posts here on this bloggy blog.

Next up for reveling, I recently-ish passed my 100th follower.  Trish ish I think was number 100 so here's a shout out to her blog.  I trying to get through the back catalogue of her blog to catch up on what's going on.

And finally things are shaping up to look like another rhymes with Froogle Madsense check coming my way so thanks to everyone that comes by and tolerates the things I choose to write about!  Also, I was reviewing my "labels" I saw that I have one for Mudkips.  I find that hilarious.

That is all.

Oh shit! it's alive

Don't count the kid out yet!  I came home to the glorious sound of my airlock bubbling away, I got anxious in the rapid cell growth phase and was going to dump out the cider when I got home!  Turns out the stuff took off and is happily bubbling away at about 13 bubbles a minute or one every 4-5 seconds.  This is pretty good and solid fermentation.  It was probably both lowering the PH (even only slightly) with brown sugar water, and adding a hardier yeast.  The champagne yeast is a higher attenuating yeast tolerant of up to 18% abv, and grapes are naturally somewhat acidic anyway.  I started this little experiment with some Nottingham ale yeast, that attenuates to about 8% abv, but I was hoping for some more complexity than the champagne gave me last time.

This batch is out there and may not be the most drinkable thing I've ever made, but damn it the yeast lives and that just makes me smile so hard right now!  I had been researching additives that would lower the PH, and found calcium carbonate and potassium carbonate are relatively cheap ~$5 and used to balance highly acid grapes, the brewstore guy warned me that the calcium carbonate would add an earthy flavor to the finished product.  I bought some, but when I got home and heard the fermenters bubbling I could hardly stop smiling.

So the good news, I didn't freak out when it wasn't working and kept the process clean, sanitizing things as I went.  There is a really good chance that this batch will turn out as good as it is able to because I was levelheaded in my dealing with a bad situation, and sometimes a funky brew is fun.  If it is as sour as I think it is, and attenuates all the way it could be in the 8% range it will be like a sour kick in the face for drinking.  Champagne yeast ferments with a dry finish, so sour with a dry finish might work out to be kind of fun.  Good thing I only have 8 gallons of the stuff to play with.  Maybe I'll get freaky and brew something else to blend it with, I have all that pumpkin in the freezer that needs to be used for something or even open up some of the cider from last year and blend them.  Aged with young and sour?

In all it was a fantastic day, the boy only screamed at me for like 45 minutes, and Tuesday night I got to sleep for about 9 hours uninterrupted (love you honey), minus the stupid truck needing to get repaired (yeah I didn't need those $120 dollars any way right? sob.)

One month old

So today marks the first month of my son's life.  Not much to say really, but I felt like the event shouldn't pass without notice.

He squirms and poos, and well generally is a baby, but here's looking forward to when your little brain starts to get to the point of understanding the world around you.  I cannot wait to blow your mind with the things in this world, really look forward to having someone help me make stuff.

Why don't I ever know anything?

So I just say that Puscifer (Maynard James Keenan's other, other band (Tool and A Perfect Circle you jerk you really should know this)) was in town for a show on Monday.  Now I doubt I would have gone, but it's hard to plan if you don't know it was coming. The link above goes to their site that plays the whole album, but here is a video for good measure.

Puscifer - Momma Sed (Official Video) from Ryan Hopman on Vimeo.

Life in a Day

This is a crazy youtube project it's an hour and a half, so strap in for this but it is assembled from 80,000 clips from users edited by Ridley Scott.  I'm at 10minutes and it's strangely compelling so far.  I guess I'm hoping for something interesting to evolve, but as long as the music keeps up I think it could be fine as it is.  Thanks gizmodo, I'm surprised Engadget didn't post this given they posted an announcement for the project.

Crisis averted

Alright it was less terrible than I originally thought and it goes to show it's not what happens to you but how you react.  I didn't get much sleep last night so encountering a problem right away in the day I wasn't ready to deal with something that was broken.

Turns out the transaction logs on the SQL server had grown quite large and filled the volume.  Treesize and a few 20gigs deleted later, life is better and no one needs to know that the reboot wasn't exactly what fixed the server.  The server most definitely needed to be rebooted, I had a new version of anti-virus that was waiting to finish installing.

I'm just paranoid about this server it failed on me before, and I was stressed when I saw that the monthly full backup had failed to complete (the password reset from the co-worker leaving pissed off the backup service).  In the end it all worked out fine.  The monthly full this month is going to be a little spotty in terms of restoring, it is currently running and only about 20% after 5 hours.  1 terabyte of data to backup FTW?  We normally let it run from on Friday night and it goes all day Saturday.  The backup averages 22 hours and only a few things have been locked at the exact moment someone was trying to use them today so for the most part most people won't even notice.

Get off Jobs dick

So this festering pile of shit article lit my fuse this morning.  An ode to how nothing was ever made nice before Steve "Aka God" Jobs descended to earth and made them nice.  My first problem is that Jonathan Ive designs Apple products, seriously look at the mans resume.  If you want to jump on someone's dick there is the man that makes these things look the way they do.  Period.

Next point Compaq before it was subsumed and defiled by HP made this product, now for the fan boys at Gizmodo that literally picked every ugly tablet that existed and ignored the best of class product for the time frame before iPad's existed I say I loathe your failure of an editorial process.  Now the downside it had a Transmeta processor, and as much as I would love for that company that paid Linus Torvold a ton of money to basically not work there to have put out a great product, it wasn't a good processor.  The revision that boasted an intel mobile processor was much better and share basically the same design.  Omitting this from your little glamour shot was shitty.

What a lovely shade of ouch you're wearing today

SeaFair came, beer was poured and I forgot that the sun wants to kill every living thing on the planet with its fierce stabbing sun rays. You could say that I'm a lovely shade of ouch, or was yesterday. Today it more of an uncomfortable shade of itchy. I'm somewhere between proud and surprised that for about 10 people (several of whom brought and drank nothing but bud light) we managed to finish the 5 gallon keg, and the 3 growlers of Naughty Scotty that came aboard as well. I'd say go us, but given the 14 hours I slept when I got back to shore I'm starting to think I'm getting old.

Hope everyone's weekend was more fun and less sunburned than mine.

Such a great weekend

The summer in the Pacific Northwest has mostly been known as the summer that wasn't. We've renamed the months as they come to better represent the weather that we have gotten. Junuary, and Julytober, (Augvember is on deck) but what little summer we have had keeps showing up on the weekends.

For this I am grateful.

This last Saturday was everything that makes people fall in love with the Pacific Northwest, it was about 68°F by 9AM, which was when we decided to meet another couple (also pregnant) to pick the "early" blues at a Blueberry farm up near our homes. In about an hour we had both managed a little less than 10lbs each and made our way to pay. The you pick berries are only $1.80/LB so it was less than $20 bucks for my 8.5lbs of berries and we got to spend time out in the sun before it got "intense". I air-quote intense because the day only got up to 83°F by the end of the day, but it was hot for us. After blueberry picking we followed the couple on an errand and then dropped the berries off at home to be cleaned later and went out to lunch.

Lunch was a quaint little Italian joint with outdoor seating and excellent food for being in the tiny ferry town. On a sunny day eating out on the patio was such a treat, and made it actually feel like summer. After lunch we walked the pier to an ice cream place and watched people fishing and crabbing for a while. In classic Northwest style one couple came out onto the pier for wedding pictures. In all it was a great afternoon. Now if you've ever been pregnant or know someone that was you would know that the pregnant ladies would be nappy after walking in the sun and eating so we went our separate ways for a nap and to clean our berries and other chores and they were coming back later for dinner.

While they were gone and my wife napped I managed to get my beer bottled and kegged (I had one batch that was fermenting in two vessels one for the keg the other for bottling). After that I got to play an hour of Modern Warfare 2 before it was time to cook dinner. Dinner was pork carnitas with fresh Pico de gallo. Just as we were finishing up dinner more friends started to arrive for S'mores. We rolled out to the back yard lit a fire, drank beer and roasted marshmallows while the sun went down.

It was a great day, I deeply with someone in Texas could have been here to experience it.

Scattered and Drawn

This is getting out of hand, my brain really cannot keep up with my own interests anymore.  Couple that with the crap that I actually have to do in a given day I think I am coming to understand why adults are so bat fuck insane.  Just this week we have physical therapy, Slut shaming (ie the slut walk) and the host of women's rights that follows on to that, digital entertainment laws winding through congress (which means you know I am on the damn phone to my senators).  After that friends I don't have time to see, weight lifting and spinning, food sovereignty, real estate and how to get out of long term debt, farming, meat curing, cheese making, beer making, childhood development, psychology, game theory, actual video games.  Money making, part time work Chasing zero, back to friends I never get to see (seriously fuck the great state of Texas for stealing my friends), various sex and sexuality conversations, anatomy and genital mutilation (I am having a son and don't care for circumcision).  All of these things are just this week.  I don't feel like I have given any of them the time and considered thought I would like to have, and next week will be more of the same.

No complaints

It's just the perfect kind of day the sun is shining, but the temperature will only be on the 70's.  I would say spring is here, strange it came in June.

Final drink for summer

*img via Chow.com

As summer draws to a close here in the Northwest it is time to have a final fairwell drink for the summer. I choose the Lemonhead to be mine.

INGREDIENTS

* 3/4 ounce limoncello, chilled
* 5 ounces cava brut, chilled

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Pour limoncello into a champagne flute, top with cava, and serve.

I am glad the bailout failed here are some better ideas

I do realize this is a little off topic for a personal technology focused blog, but I think the scope of the matter is broad enough to warrant some discussion, or at least some opinion. The companies that have been complicity playing on cheap credit extended to those that could not afford it and thriving off of the associated rapid appreciation of land that landed excessive amounts of cash in the hands of most everyone that glad handed the whole process along are due. The bell is tolling for the greedy and they are hoping that their ability to peddle fear will be effective enough to get congress to barrow money from each and every American to pay for their folly.

I am not going to say that semi-innocent people such home construction workers, and other associated trades that have lured too much of the population away from productive jobs to support this artificially over heated real estate boom aren't going to be put through hard times. I just don't believe that there is any chance of that money having a "trickle down effect". 700 billion is a lot of money, and it will likely vanish like water on sand. It will not help those struggling to stay in their home find a solution that allows them to gain equity and pay down the principle through partial loan forgiveness (say the value that the land has lost now that everyone is waking up to how inflate real estate has gotten), or any other innovative "help the people" initiatives out there.

For people that bought several houses speculatively there should be some consequence, but not necessarily loosing their primary homes (that are likely the collateral of several other homes). Letting the bank have the speculative properties and erasing the loans, (and the speculators are out all the costs that they have spent getting into those homes) would be another program that I could get behind. The banks could find themselves in the unlikely position of trying to rent houses, but there is demand out there in many markets. I realize this is pretty far out and completely unlikely to boot, but there are ways that we could minimize the damage overall, while not requiring a bailout. This would require actual hard work and true human/honest interactions, but the sting of being out $10-20k or more has to be far less then finding yourself out of home and filing for bankruptcy due to defaulting on several loans simultaneously. This would be so completely out of the character of banks and people in general, I cannot imagine a world where this happened but leasing loan forgiveness properties to property management companies that get to keep the profit between what they rent the land for and what they pay for it would drive efficiencies (property management companies are unlikely lease land they couldn't rent for a profit etc).