| California is inhabited mostly by morons. |
[Nov. 6th, 2008|01:41 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  angry | ] |
That's all I can conclude after Prop 8 passed. It's infuriating that someone out there was able to force my tax dollars to be spent deliberating over something government has no business deciding. It's infuriating that the majority of citizens of this state have decided that they like discrimination. It's disgusting to realize how easily people can be duped into giving up the freedoms that our Constitutions were so painstakingly crafted to ensure we could never lose.
To all of you who voted for Prop 8: you are morons. You are fear-driven animals, not rational human beings with minds of your own. Next time you'll probably vote for the law that regulates who you can fall in love with, and who you can make friends with. And after that you'll vote for the law that tells you when to laugh and when to breathe and when to take a crap. You're mindless idiots that will put all of us in shackles just from your own stupidity.
Any time you vote for a law that controls what your neighbor can do, you've taken away your own rights as well, you stupid dumbass. You think you've voted to protect your way of life but in reality you've helped destroy all of our lives. You've just put one more nail into all of our coffins. You're the reason George Orwell's vision of 1984 has become a reality, and you don't even realize what you've done. To yourself. To all of us.
Why don't you just climb into a pod and stick tubes into your body right now and save some time. (cf The Matrix...)
Or, better yet, wake the hell up and quit dancing to the puppetmasters' strings. Realize that you're just giving your support to a faceless powermonger who doesn't give a damn about you or your values. A shadow ruler who is *NOT* on your side, and who will steamroll right over you just as soon as you've given up enough of your rights. WAKE UP!! |
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| Because what's worse than being talked about |
[Mar. 27th, 2007|02:48 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  amused | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Capercaillie | ] |
is NOT being talked about! I threatened to write something about my friend Majella. And no, I don't make idle threats...
Though of course as threats go, it's not a very intimidating one. I mean really, Majella's a cool person, a lovely lady and great fun. I suppose over the course of time I might eventually see something unpleasant about her but in the meantime, she's just a fascinating, thoughtful, insightful, caring friend. I'm fortunate to have crossed paths with her.
Interestingly enough, though I've known who she was for quite a long time, we've only recently actually said more than a cordial hello/goodbye to each other. And now the conversation has meandered over a sprawling vista of topics, sometimes challenging, sometimes entertaining, always enlightening. Some has been a timely reminder of things I once knew, and need to know again (and really ought not to have forgotten in the first place...). Sometimes I think I needed to have had these conversations long ago. But I suppose, "when the student is ready, the teacher appears" - I probably wasn't ready.
We meet a lot of people in life. Some would say that every person you meet carries a lesson for you, every event is driven by a purpose. Sometimes I think that's just our poor human minds seeking the psychological comfort of a pattern in this random existence, projecting designs in a vain attempt to divine a hoped-for underlying order, and predict the next link in a chain of events. Other times I'm certain that there really is a purpose, a lesson to be learned in each encounter. Maybe a less deterministic way to look at it is that everything that happens, every one you meet, provides an *opportunity* for you to learn. It's always up to you to recognize the opportunity, and then absorb the lesson. I look over my past and wonder a lot about certain people who have come and gone, wondering what their role was in their brief intersection with my life. I look around me now and wonder about the people present, wondering at their role and how long they'll continue to be present.
But there are a few people who stand out, who just so obviously have some wisdom to offer, that all you have to do is absorb it and appreciate it. Majella is one of those people. |
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| Changing of the guard |
[Jan. 30th, 2007|08:59 pm] |
Recently Kurt Zeilenga, Founder of the OpenLDAP Project, informed me that he needed to step down as the technical leader of the Project. Today he appointed me as the Chief Architect. Woohoo...
In reality this isn't much of a change; Kurt had effectively been deferring the technical guidance of the Project to me for at least the past year already. So this just makes it official.
It's nice to be working on this Project in this role. It's nice to have taken what was at best a mediocre proof-of-concept code and turning it into the fastest, most scalable, most secure LDAP server in the world. Not because those achievements in themselves are so unusual. I had already done the same thing with the AppleShare server for Unix at my old company. What's nice is that this code is completely out there in the open - anyone in the world can check and verify that my claims are true. My AppleShare server was the first to support TCP/IP, even before Apple's own server, but besides a few engineers inside Apple and a few customers, nobody ever knew about it. It was also the fastest and most scalable AppleShare server in the world, easily handling tens of thousands of clients when even Apple's best server could only support a hundred or so, with response times two orders of magnitude faster than anything else.
What's nice is that I can happily tinker away at what I enjoy, being the best in the world at what I do, and now I know the world is seeing it. The world is watching, noticing.
And this *is* what I do - create the most efficient designs in the world. Real designs, that quickly become real implementations, not just fancy theories that never pan out. It's what I've always done, and there's never been anyone who could even come close. Nobody can design as comprehensively, nobody can comprehend as quickly, nobody can implement as quickly, and nobody's implementations can run as quickly.
I remember once, back in Michigan, saying to a friend "just once, I'd like to be in a singing group where I'm the *weakest* member." I remember thinking how nice it would be to meet a fiddle player who could keep up with me. It hasn't happened. It won't happen. Nobody else's brain runs near my speed, that's just reality.
A side lesson from all of this, a point I've made many times before - don't work in secret. Closed-source proprietary code is closed because it has something to hide. Take pride in your work, excise the warts. Make everything you do something to be proud of, something to show the world, and show it. Otherwise, your work is likely to disappear into obscurity, like my old AppleShare server, and then it will have all just been for nothing. |
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| Shameless materialism |
[Sep. 9th, 2006|01:40 pm] |
The next big toy on my wish list...
http://kaburaforums.com/
As a concept car it's been around for a few years, but it looks like Mazda may actually bring it out in 2008. I wish I could buy one today. |
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| Moving on |
[Aug. 9th, 2006|11:39 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  numb | ] |
Yesterday afternoon my friend of fifteen years passed on. Ian Abramovitch went peacefully, surrounded by friends and family. I wonder if he heard any of the Highland Sun CD through the headphones I put on him, before he went. I wonder where he is now.
Life goes on. But it goes on in a slightly less orderly fashion, patching up for such unplanned disruptions. There are still people to notify, web sites to update, gig schedules to revisit. Toasts to toast, stories to tell. Where do we begin? |
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| Life |
[Aug. 6th, 2006|07:55 pm] |
Life tends to be a mixed bag, and so we take the good with the bad.
The bad here is my long-time friend Ian is currently in the hospital from a heart attack. Still in critical condition, we won't be able to visit him for a while. He's been non-responsive since he went in Friday, so who knows if he's even still there, in a real sense.
I had my phone off all week while I was at Lark in the Morning camp, so I didn't find out about it until yesterday on our way back home. So much for ending the week on a pure high.
But that does lead me to the good, which was being at Lark, spending time with old friends and meeting new ones. Enjoying music, as it is meant to be. Enjoying life, and remembering what's truly valuable and important in it. Remembering who I am, as well, not just a solitary engineer slaving away thru the long hours of the night, but a creator and interpreter of life. |
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| tick tick tick tick tick |
[Jul. 28th, 2006|12:43 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | bored | ] |
Ah, there's nothing like punctuality for kicking off a plan.
Still waiting to leave, in other words. Mendocino awaits! I have decided to leave the laptop at home, I shudder to think what mountains of spam will await me in my inbox when I get back.
Time. It's rushing past us constantly, so you'd think there was an endless supply of it. And yet there's never enough to do everything you need to do. How very odd. One day I'll figure out how to capture the rushing stream of it, drink from the firehose, and have more time than I can ever possibly spend.
Till then... |
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| Owww. |
[Jul. 13th, 2006|10:38 pm] |
Once again, I'm reminded that my turnout needs work. Having gotten to the last 5 minutes of dance class, I landed hard on my toe while trying to get a treble reel step. "If you'd been turned out, that wouldn't have happened." yeah, ok....
So, life is interesting. A new Irish dance class underway, a renfaire this weekend, and by a stroke of good luck I've snagged a ticket to the Lark Camp at the last minute. Of course, it overlaps my monthly pub gig, and rather than cut short my trip, I've decided to push the gig back one week. No point driving all the way up to Mendocino and having to rush on the way back...
Somewhere in all of this I have to remember I still have a book to write. Sheesh.
Had a conference call with an industry analyst today, we ran over by about 10 minutes. He was clearly overwhelmed by what he learned from us, and asked us to update him every quarter. This is pretty cool, the word is finally getting out that we are not only whupping every one of our competitors' tails, but in the final analysis we have No competition, we're so far and away ahead of everyone else there's just no contest. Life is good.
An old friend from college days has resurfaced in my life. The jury is still out on whether this is a good thing or not, we frequently didn't see eye to eye back then. With just about 20 years under the bridge, I wonder how we've changed, what will be different now. I wonder if there's anything actually of mutual relevance in our lives now, any reason to even be friends. Why bother?
Agh. My toe hurts. Did I mention that? Ah, yes I did. And it does. Still.
Adios. |
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| How I spent my post-summer-solstice |
[Jul. 3rd, 2006|02:44 am] |
Ah, the glamorous, exotic life of a high-flying engineer. I headed out to the CTMS Summer Solstice Festival last Friday, danced like a dervish for a few hours, played tunes a few hours more, and then did the same again on Saturday. Sunday found me bugging out to the airport for Bismarck, North Dakota.
Now Bismarck, being the state capitol, is an interesting place. But what was most interesting to me was finding www.bismanlive.com while searching for "music sessions". I was ostensibly in town to teach a couple LDAP classes for the week, but BisManLive was the real heart of the trip. I hooked up with Corey Kuntz and we visited the various live music performances around town for the week, made a bunch of new friends along the way, and capped it off with a couple jam sessions. You can say hello to Corey and some of our pals here
http://www.bismanlive.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=3369#3369 and eavesdrop on a snippet of our Friday night jam here
http://media.midkotasolutions.com/media.asp?s=30878&c=2230
Definitely not my usual Celtic fare, but it was a blast nonetheless. As the great Bard once wrote - if music be the food of love, play on - give me excess of it! |
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| summertime |
[Jun. 15th, 2006|12:09 am] |
| [ | music |
| | Unnamed Mazurkas (Fiddle Music of Donegal) | ] |
blues... I am bored. Bored beyond belief. Not even learning a new fiddle tune is enough to shake it. Have I gotten so jaded that there's really nothing new and fascinating left in the world?
I've gone back to listen to the collection of tunes I first started learning, 15 years ago. I still only play about half of them, the rest I just barely scrape thru. I wonder if I'll ever master the other half. The motivation isn't really there now, I already know a zillion tunes that nobody else plays, so they're not much use in a session. They're also too hard to just spring on my band, and it's just boring to play them as solos all the time.
My friend Samantha once suggested that music was one of the things that connects me to the rest of humanity. Times like these it seems it's just another thing that isolates me. She also said that it doesn't have to be about virtuosity, and I suppose that was more her point. And yet, knowing that we humans are not perfect, I don't see that as an excuse not to strive for perfection. In a rare moment, you can play a perfect note. With practice, you may play a perfect sequence of perfect notes. Who's to say that creating perfection, one tiny spot at a time, is beyond our human capacity? And so I go on, seeking that which is so elusive. And I suppose that my chase steers me away from the mainstream, from the madding crowd.
Ultimately I guess it's not so bad to be away from the crowd, smothered under the massive herd of humanity. Yep, that's me over there, propped up in the middle of an empty pasture, a man out-standing in his field. They say it's lonely at the top. It's lonely at the sides too... |
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