Work has been crazy the past couple of weeks, which has kept me from making updates to the Notebook as often as I’d like. It looks like some good things are starting to happen, though. If the changes stay on course and continue, I might even start to be optimistic again.
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Doug
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Doug
This is not me, and I’m quite put out that someone directly responsible for typical Microsoft FUD shares my name! What this pin head is spouting is the same old same old that totally clueless drones in Redmond always spout. The amazing thing to me is that these idiots talk out of both sides of their mouth, and don’t expect people, particularly IT people, to see that. Less than a month ago, Ballmer says that Linux is the biggest competitive threat to Microsoft that exists (once again hoping to placate the DOJ), and now this guy says that Linux is trivial and will just dry up and blow away this year (trying to placate disgruntled investors).
In the meantime, we spent another day and a half trying to make Windows (of any variety) work on a Dell notebook that is suppossedly specifically design for, you guessed it, Windows. On both notebooks we’ve worked on recently, we had to use Linux to partition the disk, since Windows itself couldn’t deal with the differences between NTFS and FAT. As for enterprise-level stuff, well, I’m doing a technology assessment right now with an organization where the fact that their NT-based saerver and phone systems are totally unstable, and their employees lose entire days of productivity at a time due to servers being down. Meanwhile, our Linux servers reboot only when a)we have an extended power failure, or b)we move the company.
Unlike the other Mr. Miller, I have to live in the real world of IT. Out here, Linux makes a lot more sense, and more and more organizations are realizing that. I don’t see Linux just drying up and blowing away, no matter how much this guy may hope that happens.
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Doug
Although it was undeniably bad practice for Microsoft to have set up their DNS servers all on a single network segment, leading to this week’s well-publicized outages, a part of me can’t help feeling sorry for at least some of the technical staff involved. Having had to manage a network crisis or two in my day, I can well understand both the gallows humor and the desire to throw up expressed by some at the company in recent articles.
It does seem a bit ironic, however, that a company that claims to make the best server operating system available, complete with their own DNS implementation, has elected to outsource operation of their DNS.
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Doug
I could use one of these, maybe in the bathroom?
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Doug
It was a crappy day, in so many wonderful ways, and I didn’t get to browse much I considered link-worthy today, so I won’t. I think I’ll head off to bed and read a hundred pages or so of George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones which I’m getting really enthralled with.
Hal, my father-in-law had to deal with sleep apnea for years, and it wasn’t any fun for him or his wife. I hope your doctor visit results in something helpful. Father-in-law now has a “breathing machine” that he uses that seems to have done wonders. Of course, his kids make fun of him and the grandchildren can’t quite figure out why Grandpa puts on the alien mask when he goes to bed, but he sleeps now, and is much better for it.
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Doug
Did you ever wonder why there are so many people with Scottish surnames in the US, Canada, and New Zealand? Most people in the US probably imagine that Scots came to the US primarily like the English, during the Colonial period, or like other immigrants during the waves of immigration during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While it’s certainly true that some of both of these things happened, the actual cause of the Scottish Diaspora was The Highland Clearances.”
From the mid-1700’s to sometime after 1860, hundreds of thousands of Highland crofters were forcibly evicted from their homes to make way for using the land for raising sheep. Their crofts were burned, and thousands were put to the sword for the slightest sign of resistance. Unable to make their living farming, they took to the seas and made their way to Nova Scotia, the US, and eventually New Zealand.
What I hadn’t realized about the Clearances was the fact that the oppression of the crofters has continued very nearly up to the present day - it was only in 1976 that crofters were legally granted the right to own the land that they lived on and farmed.
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Doug
Following a link from Evhead, I started reading through the Start-up Diaries this evening. As I read, I said to myself “That’s how you used to be…that’s what it was like when you worked for start-ups, when you had your own company.” Which is a little silly, since I work for a start-up now, but it doesn’t feel like a start-up, for a whole variety of reasons.
I really started wondering what happened, somewhere along the line…it’s really started to hit me hard that at the ripe old age of 36 I’m older than many, if not most of the entrepreneurs I read about these days. I read about high-profile millionaire CEOS and VP’s of big-ass companies that are my age or younger…and I remember all through the years when I was growing up, people like my parents and my teachers and my professors all telling me how they expected great things from me; how I was going to go so far and do such great things. And I wonder, what the hell happened? What, exactly, have I really done? More importantly, why is it that anymore, I don’t really want to do those things? Why don’t I want to be a “big deal” anymore?
I used to be driven…I mean really, really driven. At age 22 a nurse once recorded my blood pressure at 180/120. I worked 14, sometimes 16 hours a day. When I had my own businesses, I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t working. Success was really, really important. It wasn’t even so much a matter of getting rich - my first job out of college earned me $11,000 a year, working for a South Dakota boarding school for Lakota kids. Not exactly a career destined to make one hyper-wealthy, but that was where I was working those huge hours and threatening to become a human fountain if someone cut me. It was a desire to make a difference, to have an influence, to do something great. Most of the stress in my life, and most of the gray in my hair is from dealing with situations where the people around me haven’t been nearly as driven to “do something great” as I was.
In the last few years, I’ve been through the collapse of my own business, the Chapter 11 (and Chapter 7) of a company I didn’t own but was highly personally invested in, and four months of sheer hell at a company solidly determined to play grab-ass petty executive politics while it’s stock price plunged into the ground, half the workforce disappeared, the CEO made off with millions of dollars of ill-gotten gains, and disgruntled customers just walked away. I’ve had to be a significant part of laying off lots of people.
I was hired to do a job that didn’t exist for a company without a recognizable business plan, and then put into a position really working for another branch of the company where I had little recognizable formal role, and spent months feeling like I was more or less superfluous. To be told that my feelings of not feeling useful were really my own fault, and had nothing really to do with the fact that the role I turned down other jobs for did not, in fact, exist.
Hell, I dunno, maybe that’s true. That’s what I start to wonder about when I read things like The Start-Up Diaries. Am I ignoring opportunities? Am I lazy? I’d rather spend time at home with my wife and kids these days than be at the office. I’d rather take all my vacation. I’m actually assembling a new company, a software and services company, out of the bits and pieces left laying about at work that I can claim, but it isn’t like we’re killing ourselves to do it. I’m not rushing from appointment to appointment, from meeting to meeting. Things get done in their own pace.
And even though I suppose it sounds like I’m whining, for the most part, I’m pretty happy with how things are. There’s just this nagging bit that says I’m letting things slide; that I’m not driven anymore, that I’m not pushing and that I should be one of these 30-something CEO’s stroking out over VC’s and profitability and whatnot. There just doesn’t seem much point to all that, though. So, on nights like tonight, I find myself wondering if I’m finding some sort of balance, or did I just get old and tired?
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Doug
I generally try not to duplicate articles from Slashdot here, but this one from John Gilmore of the EFF is just too good and too important not to draw more attention to. An quote from the rant:
“What is wrong is that we have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from scarcity.”
Seriously, folks, is this the world you want to live in?
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Doug
Larkfarm links to a site on hedgeapples, also known as the Osage Orange. For those lacking hedgeapple experience, the fruit is a semi-hard, spherical seed case, usually green, and the surface looks a bit like the surface of a brain. It’s about the size of a grapefruit, and surprisingly heavy for the size.
When I was a kid, the neighbor lad and I had a “fort” up in some trees on a hillside the overlooked his yard and his neighbor’s yard. Near this fort was a hedge apple tree, and the ground was always covered with them. In a fit of youthful ingenuity, using an old wheel rim and a piece of inner tube cut from an old tire, he and I constructed a slingshot capable of firing hedgeapples from the fort. With a bit of practice and both of us pulling back on the inner tube, we found we were able to lob these hedgeapples the entire width of his yard and into the neighbor’s garden, where we would bombard their oldest son while he was weeding. Unfortunately, he was about twice as big as either of us, and would usually come and kick our butts once he got tired of knocking down incoming hedgeapples with his shovel.
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Doug
Oh flower of Scotland,
when will we see your like again,
That fought and died for,
your wee bit hill and glen
That stood against him,
proud Edward’s army,
And sent him homeward,
ta’ think again.
The hills are bare now,
and autumn leaves lie thick and still
For land that is lost now,
which those so dearly held
That stood against him,
proud Edward’s army,
And sent him homeward,
ta’ think again.
Those days are gone now,
and in the past they must remain,
But we can still rise now,
and be the nation again
That stood against him,
proud Edward’s army,
And sent him homeward,
ta’ think again.
Oh flower of Scotland,
when will we see your like again,
That fought and died for,
your wee bit hill and glen
That stood against him,
proud Edward’s army,
And sent him homeward,
ta’ think again.
– Roy Williamson
The Notebook may have a distinctly Asian look these days, but at heart I am and ever will be a Gael, and this damn near makes me weep every time I hear it. My ancestors stood at Bannockburn with Robert the Bruce and came to the US shortly after Bonnie Price Charlie’s defeat at Culloden.
