Random tidbits Bdale thinks are worth documenting.
Bdale Garbee
bdale@gag.com
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Thu, 10 Apr 2008
Paperless no more!
Quite some time back, I
wrote
about my disappointment that
Ampad
had ceased manufacturing their Quad Ruled Steno Books,
which I use to make notes to myself on just about everything.
Several of my friends in Europe responded that similar pads in A5 size were commonly available in retail stores, and I quite happily bought a few on a trip to Germany. Then, one of my colleagues at work had some nice notebooks made up for a customer event with grid paper and suitable logos on the cover that I grabbed a few of and have used quite happily.
Sometime in the intervening years, Ampad started producing these pads again, but with a different product number, 42036. I stumbled over some at a local office supply store and bought a big pile... others have noticed too, and sent me email about it, which is why I'm taking the time to write this...
Yes, I'm much happier now!
Tue, 16 Oct 2007
Colorado Rockies in World Series!
I'm not a serious fan of professional sports, but over the years, I've enjoyed watching a wide variety of sporting events at different times and for different reasons. It can be fun when a relatively local team is doing well, and even more fun when they're doing well with style.
For the last week or so, I've been paying attention to Major League Baseball for the first time in several years. Last night, from a hotel room on my current business trip, I watched the Colorado Rockies baseball team take the National League championship, thereby winning the right to compete in this year's World Series.
It's pretty amazing that they've now won 21 of their last 22 games, including seven straight in the playoffs. But there are two other things that captured my attention last night prompting me to comment here. The first is that this really has been a team effort. With due respect to the various players on the team, none of them seem to be superstars... instead, they come across as a group of very good players who are just doing their jobs really well. And second, they really do seem to be having fun and aren't taking themselves too seriously.
I don't know what's going to happen next. They may win, they may lose. But those two observations last night cheered me up after a fairly stressful day, and left me encouraged that doing what you love as well as you can, and finding others to work together with who care as much about the cause at hand as you do can still lead to extraordinary results.
That's pretty cool.
Sat, 18 Aug 2007I was just reading the latest issue of Home Power magazine, which is celebrating 20 years of publication with this issue. One of the articles, by Kathleen Jarschke-Schultze, talks about the value of reusable cotton bags for shopping instead of accepting the usual "paper or plastic". It caught my eye because my wife Karen is an avid cotton-bag user. Kathleen ends the article with an idea that I think is worth repeating:
So how about this new etiquette: Conservation in everything except courtesy and generosity. Seems like that would be a refreshing change. We all need to just put one foot in front of the other to keep moving forward on conserving global resources. Even if it is slow or small, take that first step.
I like that. Conservation, courtesy, and generosity should never go out of style...
Wed, 21 Mar 2007
Programmer Personality Test
A long-time friend pointed me to another "categorize yourself" site the
other day, this time it's a
Programmer Personality Test.
He pointed out that it's only 12 questions, wouldn't take long, and he'd be
interested in how I scored. I found the questions really irritating, but
the results led to some interesting discussion that my friend suggested might
be worth a blog entry.
I get either a DLSB or PLSB, depending on which arbitrary choices I make on several questions where neither option is at all representative of my world view. He found this interesting, since I'm the only other person he's talked to about this that also got a P. He also noted that LS seems to be very strong in all the "real programmers" he knows, and wondered if that might be why managing programmers is so much like herding cats.
One of the bits that I find so artificial about this is that the model that I personally find most effective in the loner/group continuum isn't reflected by the questions at all. It's neither a "do it all myself" nor a "engage with everyone before doing anything" approach. The free software community collaboration experience has proven to me that the most effective approach is a hybrid, where you "do something" followed by engaging collaborators, who may well help you decide to throw a lot away, which is ok if it was a learning experience, and/or it leads to a better result. In the end, you may not even be the center of attention or "owner" of the result.
In fact, often the way to get something done right is ensure that you get the right person to do it, which often isn't yourself... but the strategy for getting the right person to do it is almost never to engage in group-think before doing any work! It seems to me that in our community, leading usually starts with doing, while success is related to who else gets motivated to follow your lead and join in the doing...
Wed, 02 Aug 2006
New Tie-Dye Shirts!
After dropping my daughter off at camp today, we wandered over to
In The Groove
so that I could pick up some fresh tie-dyed shirts. My son found a few
he liked in his size, too, and my wife bought a cute patchwork skirt.
Good thing everything in the store we cared about was 30% off today...
Wed, 12 Jul 2006
Flag Burning
It's rare that I find a letter to the editor of a newspaper profound enough
to be worth tearing out and saving. Today was one of those days.
I am pleased to discover that the
full text is visible online, so I can share Ashley Frohwein's letter
Insight on Fourth of July flag burning here.
Sadly, I'm not always proud of my country... but some of the principles on
which it was founded remain as noble and inspiring as ever!
Paperless?
For a couple years, I've routinely used
Ampad
Quad Ruled Steno Books
to make notes to myself on just about everything.
This morning I realized I'm using the last one from my most recently acquired
package of 12... so, naturally, I tried to order some more.
They're gone. Apparently, nobody sells a quad-ruled steno pad any more.
I even called Ampad corporate customer service, where a very helpful woman poked around on her computer and confirmed that the product has been discontinued, and the last case in their inventory shipped out as part of an order to a university bookstore in early April. There aren't any more in stock, and they probably won't ever print any more.
Grumble. At least I can still buy quad-ruled engineering pads, even if they are clumsier to carry around...
Mon, 01 Aug 2005
Grandmother
My maternal grandmother Estill Winfree Barksdale passed away
on Saturday night. She was 101 years old.
I was fortunate to grow up near all of my grandparents and many other elder relatives. They each had some impact on my perception of the world, on what I think is important, and on how I try to lead my life.
But it's the little things about Grandmother that flood my mind today... from lemonade made pink with juice from the bottle of maraschino cherries always in her refridgerator when I was little, to the firmness of her grip several weeks ago when I last saw her.
She was extraordinary, and I will miss her.
Wed, 29 Jun 2005
Server Woes
My main
gag.com
server has been down nearly as much as it has been up for
the last week. My apologies to those this has inconvenienced.
Appears to be a RAID controller problem, but I won't know for sure until I get home next week, just before leaving for Helsinki.
Sat, 04 Jun 2005
Done!
For the first time since early 2003, I'm actually caught-up on signing keys!
Even with good tools, getting caught up took time. Now that I've found caff, I hope to do a better job of staying caught up from now on.
Thu, 12 May 2005
Fear Not!
During the key signing at
LCA 2005,
I promised to sign all the keys from that event before I left Australia...
and I actually got it done... at 05:30 on the morning of our departure!
And since then, I've been doing a good job of signing keys as I trade
credentials.
The problem is that I have several zip-loc bags full of key credentials covering the time period from the 2003 edition of LCA until the start of the 2005 edition. I'm not quite sure why, but tonight I got the itch to get on with signing them... so some of you are likely to already be surprised, or be surprised soon, to find signed keys in your inbox. Patience may still be required, though, as it's going to take a while to get completely caught up!
Enjoy... and if you have credentials for me that you haven't acted on, how about joining me in getting caught up! Thanks to nudging from Enrico Zini, my current favorite tool of choice for key signing is caff. Much easier for everyone involved than cabot, and accomplishes about the same objectives.
Fri, 29 Apr 2005
Musings
Freshened the server hosting this Blosxom instance to current sarge late
last night, but was too tired to deal with the restructuring of the Blosxom
config files until this morning. Sorry if that bothered anyone.
In the process, I was reminded that it has been a while since I posted anything here. I guess this comes less naturally to me than to some folks... but as long as I'm typing...
My thanks to everyone in Australia who made my family feel so welcome on our recent trip surrounding LCA 2005. It was great fun!
Mon, 02 Aug 2004
Oh What Fun... Not!
Came home from a weekend in the mountains with my family to discover that the
UPS serving the stack of networking gear and the main gag.com servers had shut
itself down, apparently during a big thunderstorm last Thursday evening.
Fortunately, pushing the "on" button on the UPS was enough to bring everything back to life with no apparent loss of data. But I can't help wondering if there isn't something wrong with the UPS, since it should have powered itself back up even if the batteries got run all the way down... nothing useful in the error logs.
Sun, 11 Apr 2004
fixing a few things
Chasing down a few nasties on my main server tonight.
Updated blosxom, and spent just enough time to figure out how to create a lightly customized flavor that won't get stomped on upgrade. Looks a little less ugly than previously.
Re-installing mailman in hopes of avoiding having to debug the odd behaviors that John and I have stumbled over since I upgraded the server from woody to sarge. I was pretty naive when I first started using mailman, and taking the time to start over now that I know what I want seems worthwhile. Sigh.
Thu, 25 Mar 2004
Now That's a New One...
While I've smiled for a lot of photographs at speaking engagements around the
world in the last year or three,
to the best of my knowledge Elizabeth Gordon-Werner is
the first person who ever painted me during one of my talks. Pretty cool.
She has the
painting
of me online, along with lots of others from this and other events at her
Art Smitten site.
Bad Caps
My wife couldn't read her email last night. Turns out the old Apple Airport
wireless access point we still depend on had failed again.
All lights blinking red, and a low buzzing sound in time with the
blinking. Same symptoms as the other time it failed. Turned out to need the
same fix again, too.
Disassembled the flying saucer, and started wiggling parts on the board with the power applied until I found where the buzzing was coming from... one of the electrolytic caps in the power supply. Fortunately, I had a suitable replacement in my parts stock and we were back on the air ten or fifteen minutes later.
One of these days, it'll fail during daylight hours and I'll just drive into town and buy an 802.11g hub to replace it... after all, my current laptop supports a/b/g, and the old hub is b-only. But, when it's night, it's snowing, and there's a hockey game on... having tools, parts, and experience troubleshooting recalcitrant widgets is good for family harmony!
Wed, 22 Oct 2003
HP nc4000
Well, I finally broke down and bought a new notebook... an HP nc4000. The
Omnibook 500 was finally starting to fall apart. There are a couple of things
about the new machine that still annoy me, but I think I'm going to end up
liking it.
I've started a Debian on the nc4000 web page to detail my experiences getting it working well with Debian. Just getting started, really, but feel free to keep an eye out there if you're curious.
Thu, 02 Oct 2003
Grrr
Updated the blosxom package on this system only to realize that some of the
files I had hacked weren't tagged as conffiles in the Debian packaging sense,
and so my changes were lost.
That probably means I should have been configuring things some other way, but
it's still frustrating.
Updated Blosxom
Inspired by the improved look of Anthony Towns'
Indolence Log, I decided it
was worth a few minutes to update Blosxom to version 2.0. This is still a
fairly naive use of the technology, but I at least feel as though I'm making
progress.
I haven't exactly been writing here routinely... maybe I'll get more motivated now? (Ha!)
Not everything is configured to my satisfaction yet.