Musing, Muttering, Meandering Through Life

A friend sent me this collection of quotes before he headed to the polls.

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)

I had several people ask for my impressions of the G1 so I put a video together instead of spending a lot of time typing. In general, it’s pretty good for a first generation device. I don’t really like the bar with the roller obstructing access to the keyboard, but I’m starting to get use to it already.

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

Off and on all summer, we’ve been trying to figure out how to get Alex to school. He is attending The American University in Washington, DC and will be majoring in International Studies.

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.

Goodbye

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.

Let’s face it, I collect computers. Trust me, I don’t want to be in the computer collection business, but some how I have several sitting in the closet and many up and running as I write. Being an entrepreneur, start-up engineer, software developer, etc, I need machines to get things done. So, I tend to treat the house like a personal data center. Several enabling technologies have emerged that have helped me start down-sizing my home data center to be much more energy and space efficient. At this point noise and heat are still my biggest issues.

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.

We’ve decided to sell the boat. There are several reason for the decision

1. The closest lake has been too low, ramps closed
2. The closest lake has been too high, ramps closed
3. The slip fees at the closest marina are outrageous ~ $4000 per year which means I wouldn’t have to worry about the ramps.
4. Alex is headed off to school and we’re trying to get rid of all payments

We’ve had a lot of good times on the boat both at home and away. My favorite trip was a week in Branson, MO. I was able to go out on a whim because it was in a slip a short walk from the condo.

Ok, if you’re on twitter, you need to jump over to the @rainbowteam and join by clicking follow. If you need to colorize your avatar Cali Lewis posted a rainbowteam.png to help you modify your avatar.

For the rest of you, zefrank wrote a post entitled "colorwar 2008" where he mused.

We used to play color wars at summer camp. Near the end of the year the entire camp would split up into colors, red, green, black, blue, etc… and compete in a series of events: tug of war, egg toss, basketball - sort of like the movie Meatballs, except all within the same camp.

During the summer we were divided into discreet units, older kids here, younger kids there, Hiawathans by the lake Tawasenthans by the ropes course, etc… But when it came time for color wars you had no idea who would be on your team. It was a release, and it was viciously fun.

So, for a while I’ve been thinking about how a color war might look online.

Corvida states Boredom Strikes On Twitter With Color!. Her summary statement

If this isn’t boredom, I don’t know what is, but at least it gives us something to do.

While I’m not sure how this is going to play out, and I’m probably too busy anyway, I decided to join and and see what the fun might be.

Twitter is a very interesting place.

Authors on the Net don’t always consider their readership. For instance, consider the problem of puffy eyes or bags under the eyes. In the modern world what do we do? Google of course. Who is allowed to use Google? Everyone, including teenagers.

Take a moment to read the following excerpt found during my quest to answer the question, “What the hell was she thinking?”.

Here are some instructions to reduce eye puffiness:

The puffiness of the eyes can be reduced with a glass of ice water and
four stainless steel spoons.

“Chill the spoons in the water and then place one over each eye. When
the spoons become warm, switch them with the others chilling in the
glass of water. Keep switching until you see improvement.”

Link

Obviously, the author didn’t consider the improvisation and lack of forethought that is the hallmark of a teenage mind. For example the following questions should have probably been asked.

• What is an alternative place to cool spoons?
• Does a teenager always remember that they started something?
• Does a teenager think, is this a good idea?

For instance, why bother with a glass out of the cabinet, filling it with ice, water, and worry about wet spoons, when you can simply drop them in the ice maker?

What could go wrong, it’s not moving now, how could the spoons cause a problem?

Imagine the dialog.

• Parent: Honey, how long have the spoons been in the ice maker?
• Teenager: Ice maker? Who would put spoons in the ice maker?

The funny thing is, the ice maker functioned for a very long time with spoons wrapped around in various places. Just as surprising is that an ice maker has enough torque to bend spoons and not just jam.

I discovered this “experiment” yesterday when we replaced our aging refrigerator with a one year old unit we bought from a friend. I took the ice bin outside and dumped it in the flower bed and was a little startled when I heard metallic clinking as the ice hit the ground.

So, to all your helpful Heloise’s out there, please consider that teenagers do roam the Net and their solution may just surprise you.

I find the affect of clutter to be cyclical. Sometimes, when I know what I need to get done and I can be fully absorbed in the task, it has no affect. Other times, when I don’t have a clear picture on what needs to be done, it really bothers me.

There are a ton of tasks to be done this time every year: taxes, new development projects, school activities, etc. All of them seem to slowly suck the life out of me. Oh, and don’t forget winter is starting to lose it’s grasp, so yard work is about to start calling too. It’s enough to make you want to crawl back in bed and pull the covers up.

I wonder if hibernation would get us out of doing taxes and bookwork?

On the bright side, today was the first day of the year that it’s nice enough to put the top down on the car and let the sunshine help drive the winter blues away. Maybe a few more days of direct sunlight will allow the winter fog to lift and release the energy that I need to start knocking tasks off the list.

Update: Reading through my news feed I ran across this post A Guide to Cutting Back When You Feel Overwhelmed from Zen Habits.

It took quite a while to get all the pieces put together, mostly because I couldn’t figure out how to disable the new canonical URL stuff in Wordpress. Once I located the section of code to comment out, it started coming together pretty rapidly. As part of the conversion process, I also had to upgrade Gallery to Gallery2.

The impetus for the rewrite was a desire to aggregate all of my flotsam and jetsam. I wanted to hopefully drive more traffic to the site so that I can generate a small amount of revenue from ads, books, etc. At a minimum, it’ll help offset the cost of my toys.

What I’ve discovered is that it’s pretty easy to start pulling in the bits and pieces from Twitter, Magnolia, LibraryThing, et al. to make a semi-coherent website using the best of breed tools sprinkled around the net.

I’m keeping www.donthorp.net - Version 1 up and running for the time being, as well as my blog on wordpress blog.donthorp.net.