Thoughts about Obama and Democrats

A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
- George Bernard Shaw

A liberal is someone who feels a great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money.
-G Gordon Liddy

A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have.
-Thomas Jefferson

Thoughts about McCain and Republicans

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
-P.J. O’Rourke, Civil Libertarian

Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
-Ronald Reagan (1986)

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
-Herbert Spencer, English Philosopher (1820-1903)

Thoughts FOR Libertarians

There is no distinctly Native American criminal class…save Congress.
-Mark Twain

What this country needs are more unemployed politicians.
-Edward Langley, Artist (1928 - 1995)

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First Impressions: T-Mobile G1 from Don Thorp on Vimeo.

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Random Facts

Let’s consult “The Book of Don”.

Random Fact #1

As a kid, I usually minded pretty well, but in this case I “bent” the rules a bit. We lived on a ranch in Missouri that had several ponds. One day as I was heading out for some reason mom told me to not get wet. Not sure how she knew I was considering going swimming in the pond, but she must have had an idea. But, I really wanted to see what it was like to swim in early April after the ice had thawed. Solution: Skinny dippin and for the record it was cold, not too bad, but it also gave me the ability to sympathize with George Constanza years later. Oh and I returned home safe and dry.

Random Fact #2

Growing up on a ranch you also need certain skills, one of which is artificially breeding cattle. It’s one of those skills that I don’t think one can ever forget.

Random Fact #3

Laura and I got engaged after our third date. She lived in Amarillo at the time and I was still going to school at TCU. She had graduated a little earlier from TCU. Neither of us knew the other while we were at TCU. So three dates in less than a month and we’re engaged. I can still remember us telling her parents as we were putting up the Christmas tree. First words out of her father’s mouth … “Are you pregnant”.

It’s worked out pretty well, we just had our 21st anniversary.

Random Fact #4

I’ve worked on many different projects over the years but three consumer items that I worked on were.

1. Tandy Sensation the first Windows multimedia PC. Some one even put up a video of an old commercial
2. Tandy VIS a horribly flawed device that we actually made sort of work, but it failed miserably.
3. Gateway Destination PC item #20 towards the bottom of the page. First real attempt to have a converged device in the Den.

Random Fact #5

I’ve been growing my hair out for over 18 months. The story of which will appear in an upcoming blog post. In the spirit of baring oneself, most of the hair is on the sides and back; Not so much contributed from the top of my scalp.

Random Fact #6

Self-funded (read really similar to starving college days) Select Payment Processing, with some friends. It was successfully sold years later.

Tag You’re It

@jmthorp who is my brother and writes http://thorplife.wordpress.com/ after the kids crashed the hard drive on his old site.

John Munsch who has no twitter account, a long time friend, and writes http://www.johnmunsch.com/

@frizzle_fry Melissa Astle who also has no twitter account, whom I’ve worked with for years, never met, and writes http://randommisfires.wordpress.com

@dogwood who writes http://thedogwoodreport.blogspot.com/

@stevesaylor who writes http://stevesaylor.net/

@pprlisa who never writes but should at http://lemloo.wordpress.com/

The Rules

The rules to play are easy …
1. Link to the person who tagged you. Matt Tagged me here.
2. Post the rules on the blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post.
5. Let each person know they have been tagged.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

I look forward to learning about y’all. Tag, you’re it!

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For months I’ve had a nagging suspicion and you’ve probably noticed it too: we’re in the midst of a bacon and pumpkin epidemic. It’s not hard to miss given bacon’s dalliances in bacon infused vodka, candied bacon ice cream, and the true heart stopper — chicken fried bacon. Pumpkin is no homebody either; out there galavanting around in pumpkin chocolate chip muffins, pumpkin ravioli, and pumpkin jelly rolls. I’m all for culinary experimentation, but this is a plague of mutated foods that threatens us all.

Look back to the somewhat provocative Reese’s marketing campaign of the 1970s and 1980s where we learned that some things, like chocolate and peanut butter, do belong together. This campaign helped bring about a new world order where people were free to co-mingle ingredients in an understanding environment. Nowhere in the campaign did they suggest there was a license for wholesale promiscuity between all editable items.

I LUV bacon and adore pumpkin; but seriously, some things are not meant to be joined. I’m not trying to discourage experimentation and creativity as I want new culinary delights just like the next guy. Experiment if you dare, but post warnings when it goes wrong, don’t propagate the misfortune by turning it into a recipe and publishing it world-wide. That recipe might appear in some demented marketing company’s campaign: “AS SEEN ON THE INTERNET, foods to torture your tastebuds and upset your stomach”. It’s just not right.

Interventions are a common method of helping people confront their problem. Earlier this week CBS’s “How I Met Your Mother” had an episode in which the group staged interventions at the drop of a hat. While they almost needed an intervention for interventions, I’m a little disappointed that they didn’t recognize the need for a bacon and pumpkin intervention. Consult the table of Google search results or hop on over to twitter search and you’ll be amazed at how often these items appear. We’re clearly out of control. While I was typing the last 2 sentences, the bacon OR pumpkin search had 6 updates.

Did you noticed that there were 247,000 results for recipes that combine bacon and pumpkin; it’s just not holy. Every year I look forward to Fall and the return of the venerable pumpkin pie. Be creative if you must, alter the spice proportions, change sweeteners, or adjust the flakiness of the crust, but don’t follow Joe and codify desecration of a sacred food. Imagine my horror when I discovered this abomination, “Joe’s Incredible Bacon Pumpkin Pie”. This could be the tip of the iceberg, what’s next; bacon soda?

Don’t just sit there when it’s clear we have a problem. Call your friends. Alert the neighbors. Then let’s gather at Joe’s for the first of many interventions.

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FriendFeed is a wonderful aggregation service that simplifies keeping in touch with friends and family. FriendFeed lets you publish the data from your blog, social network sites, photos, and other places for others to see without them having to visit each site individually. It also has an interesting twist in that you can create Imaginary Friends where you put in the services you want to watch even if the person doesn’t have a FriendFeed account.

While catching up on my brother Michael’s feed I stumbled upon two separate pictures of my niece and nephew that had to be mashed. Enjoy.

The Disappointed Princess

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@Natallini was putting off mowing the yard. Feeling all considerate, it is a Friday after all I, suggested a Tyvek suit or a cabana boy.

If she just wanted to stay clean, then the suit should work great.
With a handsome cabana boy to work the mower, she could sit on the porch and have her favorite beverage.

Then she was attacked in her own home, by vicious little creatures.

For those of you fortunate enough to have never encountered the painful little creatures, count yourself lucky. The rest of you understand the primitive need to squish them all. If you’d like to know more about fire ants check out the Wikipedia article on Fire Ants If you’d like to see them in action, there is a short video below.

Then we had a slight burst of misunderstanding between me @donthorp, @Natallini, and @eeUS

And then the Serendipitous tweet.

Trust me we’re getting there. My first thought, obviously, was Google. Surely someone out there has fire ant proof suits; but sadly, I couldn’t find one. I did find a patent entitled Insect resistant geotextile. For the very curious among you it’s actually interesting how they tested for insect resistance, so give it a quick scan. The connection to this story is provided in the following quote.

EXAMPLE I

[0034] An extruded nonwoven, such as Tyvek® was used to form a bag which was sealed to prevent the ants escape. The ants penetrated the extruded nonwoven within two (2) hours.

Although it only gives her a two hour window to escape, that should be sufficient if she also tapes the cuffs.

Now you’re wondering why Grizzlies. Occasionally we’re granted a Google gift during a search that provides fodder for posts such as this. I originally searched for ant proof suit. Lost in the search euphoria, I didn’t save the set of keywords brought me to this, but here is the video that brought the laughter.

There is just something about the testing of that grizzly proof suit that brought me to tears. My first thought was, “That’s a whole lot of Mondays”.

Some of you may have recognized the source immediately, but I had to research to discover that the footage comes from a movie, available on Amazon, entitled Project Grizzly by Troy Hurtubise. It documents “Hurtubise’s diligent work to improve his homemade “grizzly-proof” suit of armour, his efforts to test its resilience, and his forays into the Rockies to track down the grizzlies he dreams of meeting.”

I really don’t know if the grizzly suit is fire ant proof or not, but I’m convinced that the testing of the suit for use with fire ants would provide hours of painful video.

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I’ve wondered for years how the drain cover stays in place, but I never bothered to actually look. On close inspection there seemed to be four tabs holding it in place, so a little pressure and it popped right out. If you look closely, you’ll see a little bump on the tab that helps keep it below the rim.

After successfully pulling the cover off, I peered into the drain and was greeted by a glob of stuff that honestly, was probably alive. Reaching in the drain, I SLOWLY pulled and pulled and pulled, until finally with a soft plop, an ENTIRE ponytail looking creature was resting peacefully on the shower floor. Thankfully, it didn’t spring to life and attack.

For the squeamish among you, I won’t embed the pictures, but for the rest of you crazy people, head over to my SmugMug Gallery Drain Life.

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We had several options:

1. Drive and tour the eastern part of the US
2. Drive one-way and fly home
3. Have the Family fly out carrying some of his bags and have a mini-vacation in DC
4. Put Alex on the plane and say have fun

The last option may seem a little harsh for sending your child off to college, but we’ve had a couple of years to prepare. Alex attended the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science (TAMS) at the University of North Texas for his last two years of High School. The program is a residence program where kids can take college courses and earn their High School degree. This period allowed all of us to adjust to him being away from home, but not so far that we couldn’t meet up on a whim.

Soon after he graduated, we put him on a plane for summer school in Guadalajara, Jalisco Mexico at the Universidad de Guadalajara CEPE. He took a couple of courses and was able to tour the region where he took many interesting photos. All of Alex’s photos are available on his SmugMug account. He may have visited other places, but I do know he went to Puerto Vallarta, Guanajuato, and Zapopan a suburb of Guadalajara. One of the messages from him during the trip informed us that Guanajuato would be a great place for us to live if we ever do decide to retire in Mexico.

After he came back from Mexico, he hung out with us for a while before taking a driving tour of the Western US. I have yet to go through all of the photos of ‘Road Trip 08′, but it looks like they had a great time. The trip started in Jackson Hole, WY where his friend Laura picked him up from the airport and ended in Corpus Christi, TX at Laura’s house.

Alex came back in time to get off the bus from Corpus to help us load a U-Haul trailer full of stuff to transport to Tulsa where we exchanged it for other stuff, to bring back to Texas. I found out that he’d had maybe one hour of sleep since leaving Corpus after he learned of the Canadian bus incident; after the trip had started. He helped us prepare for the garage sale before packing his things for school. He had whittled things down before he left for Mexico, but he was able to make another pass through to provide more fodder for the sale.

I’ve been telling a good friend of mine for weeks, that we were probably going to just send Alex to school because he didn’t have enough stuff for us to need to drive. Here’s the proof.

His total belongings amounted to:

1. 3 boxes shipped via UPS ($88 ground, 2 day air was $425, um no thanks)
2. backpack (not shown)
3. 2 bags with him on the plane ($40 in excess baggage fees)

Sorry for the poor images (silly camera on phone), but I think it shows that it really was minimal.

So this morning at 5:30 AM, Alex and I headed to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport so that he could catch his 7:20 AM plane to DC. We walked in, I paid for the extra baggage, $40, gave him a hug and headed back to open the garage sale.

When I got home, I realized he had forgotten the tracking information for the boxes. So I typed them up and shipped him a quick email. Then to let me know when they arrived, I added them to TrackThis so that I would be notified on my Twitter account when the packages arrived.

A few hours later, at approximately 10:00 AM CDT, I sent this tweet.

At 10:10 AM CDT, I received this text from Alex

Just touched down

At 11:36 AM CDT, he announced his arrival at his room, which he’s sharing with two others.

…only two desks.

At 1:46 PM CDT, I knew everything was ok, because I was informed I owed him money.

School supplies were 50 … showers are good..better than our house

At 1:53 PM CDT, I received an email, that told me that he was settled in and rarin to go.

… edited …
Now I’m off to look into getting my iphone (:

Hopefully soon, I’ll get the text or phone call from said iPhone to prove that everything turned out as expected. Otherwise, he’ll need money at some point, then I’ll hear from him.

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Today is a day of transition from the known to the unknown. Last week I decided that I needed to take a break for a much needed rest. Two thousand three hundred thirty-five days ago on March 18, 2002, I said hello as employee number 18; Today on August 8, 2008 I say farewell. A thank you and best wishes to each and every one of the talented people I had the opportunity to travel with on that part of my journey.

Inflection Points

Every so often in my life an inflection point appears and when it does, I’ve learned to embrace it as a doorway to a new adventure. They’re not always joyous adventures, but like any good adventure they provide tales for telling. These tales fit me well at this stage of my life. There are several transitions that I might detail in the future, but I want to touch on several of them in this story.

I can remember the first real transition and it’s not a pleasant one. My dad passed away from cancer when I was 13 and a short while later mom told me that we’d have to move into town. I can remember clearly that my response was extreme frustration. I had lost dad and now I was losing access to all of the activities I loved: hunting, fishing, horseback riding, and even my chores. In a fury, I packed up all of my favorite items to get them out of my sight because I knew the enjoyable part of my life was done. It didn’t take long for me to come to terms with the transition and once I did, I embraced it.

I had a couple of education related inflection points. During Spring Break of my Junior year of High School, I visited my grandparents who were wintering in South Texas. I’m fuzzy on the exact timing, I can’t remember if I decided before or after break, but I knew when I returned that there was nothing left for me in High School. When I got home, I took the GED and started summer school at ORU where my step-dad was a professor.

I started off pre-med, the decided on pure Chemistry. I was enjoying the studies, but apparently I had approached another inflection point. I was standing in a lab three years later, having completed all of my Chemistry degree courses and one of my professors made a simple comment, “you are really good with computers, have you taken any courses?” Apparently that was the click of another door opening.

I had started programming on the TRS-80 model I when I was 13 or 14 and spent a large portion of my free time working with computers, but I had never really considered it as a profession. Shortly after the comment, I realized that while I liked Chemistry, I loved working with computers and the variety they presented. Before the end of the semester I started the transfer process to TCU and as soon as the semester ended, moved to Fort Worth, TX. I hadn’t even been accepted yet, but I knew that’s where I would be.

Near the end of my penultimate semester at TCU, Laura and I got engaged. Some of you are thinking OK, So? What you may not know is that we had only had 3 dates before the engagement. This transition was a little drawn out, but I graduated in May of 1987, started my first full time job in June of 1987, and got married on July 4th, 1987. For those of you trying to do the math, we’ve been married 21 years now. It may seem odd, but I knew that it was the correct door to step through.

Near the end of the .COM bubble, one of my good friends Bill and I decided to form a company. We had been contracting together doing software for the Destination PC and decided that we should open an office, which is a pretty big commitment. After a while, we decided to self-fund an idea and brought in another one of my good friends, John. John and I continued contracting to pay the bills and help part time on the project while Bill worked full time on the project. The story is too long to tell in full, but the short version is, John and I threw ourselves into the collapsing job market so that Bill could stay with Select Payment Processing to guide it through several tough years to a successful acquisition. If all three of us had stayed, the company would not have been able to survive the collapse of the bubble. That acquisition is helping allow me to discover my next adventure.

The Unknown or There’s a World Outside of Yonkers

This inflection point is a little different than the others in that I have nothing planned except rest. “Out There”, from Hello Dolly, has been on an endless playback loop in my head the last couple of weeks. I think it helps convey the hope that this change presents. Next week is a little busy, we’re going to have a HUGE garage sale, but I see that as part of the resting process.

My current short bio says “Overcommited, Developer, Entrepreneur, Part Time Trader”. My new short bio? “Adventurer in Waiting”. If you need to find me, look for a vista surveying a landscape of opportunity. Some where, out there, is the next doorway to adventure, I’m not sure where it is, but it’s there.

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In the past, I would buy the best computer I could build and install everything under the sun on it to try and keep costs down. Problem is each machine would start collecting more and more cruft and the next thing you know, you’re wanting another box.

Not too long ago, VMWare unshackled their server product and allowed me to start collapsing physical hardware on to virtual hardware. They also made their product run on Linux, including Ubuntu my current distro of choice. The combination of VMWare Server with Ubuntu gave me the power to have a low/no cost solution for collapsing physical machines and easily re-using older hardware.

Another benefit is that I could start building single purpose “machines”. I could afford to run a Virtual Machine (VM) per application or have development specific VMs. A huge benefit was that you can migrate a VMs quickly to different hardware. I can, for example, take a web application from my “data center” drop it on my laptop and go mobile. When I get home, I simply move it back into the data center. When I buy a new host machine, I can easily move the VMs and recycle the old hardware without having to re-install all of the software. Not only have I started running server type applications in their own VM, I have also started creating single purpose VMs for desktop applications. Currently, I have a VM for my trading/investment software and I’m about to build a VM for my QuickBooks and other bookkeeping and business tasks.

I know I’m behind, but I finally took a look at the Dell Studio Hybrid. There is a review on PC Magazine. Seeing the form factor, I immediately wondered if it would run Ubuntu. Quick little search and I found the quote below at Dell’s IdeaStorm.

To me, a home VM server needs:

1. The capacity to have lots of RAM
2. Enough storage for all of the VMs you want to host
3. A fast, cool running multi-core CPU
4. Runs quietly. Noise is tiring and annoying
5. The ability to run Ubuntu and VMWare server
6. Draw as little energy as possible
7. One or more Gb ethernet adapters

What it doesn’t need:

1. Fast graphics, I access the machines remotely
2. Big form factor, I might want it in a closet.
3. Proprietary anything, we want to run linux
4. It should be relatively inexpensive

The Studio Hybrid allows:

• Intel Core 2 Duo up to 2.6GHz
• 4 GB RAM
• 320 GB SATA Hard Drive
• Integrated video with DVI and HDMI
• Built-in wireless N and Gigabit Ethernet

What I haven’t been able to determine is how quiet it is. You can see from the back panel that it does have a fan, so it can’t be completely silent. But in all other aspects, it looks like it could be a viable platform for a VM host in my greener home data center.

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