Out of Band
Well, whatever doesn't fit elsewhere.
You’d think life would look easier once you are “over the hill.” Hardly a surprise, it doesn’t. So this morning as I awoke for my 14,610 day, I had to ask myself “what have a really learned so far” -- aside from a few hundred bad jokes and puns and inventory of geeky knowledge that is? Seems like anything else meaningful boils down to one of three things:
1. The actual whole always exceeds the apparent sum
2. The only easy day was yesterday
3. It is okay to be imperfect
There’s not much elaboration needed or, frankly, even possible on this.
But today is normally the day I make my “life altering” decisions for the year and it is time for me to go public with a few things. First, I owe a big debt of thanks to my life partner of the last ten years. Janell has been both a great influence and tremendous asset in my life. However, some relationships – no matter how loving or great – can’t weather the sorts of changes my life has taken in the last few years. Janell and I essentially parted our ways back in June of this year. She’s met somebody that’s ideal for her and is making plans to be with them permanently. I really couldn’t be happier for them. Sure, breaking up is hard and sad. Given my crazy travel schedule and that they have bonded well to her, we’ve decided that she gets to keep the Cats. While I’m sure I’ll miss Janell more than I will them, it was almost a non-decision to let go here. They’ll still get plenty of love and play in their new world to.
As for me, I wasn’t going to just sit on my butt and feel sorry for myself for long. Back in June I started using a few match making services. I’ve met some really outstanding people on each of them, but one has been an especially great match for me. I really feel like we have the makings of a great future together, Well, it was great while it lasted... Good luck Alison, and thanks for the good memories so I’m in the process of moving to a new city to be with her. That means leaving my home for the last decade. While I like Omaha, a change in latitude has given me a change in attitude and it is certainly for the better. It does mean that I’m going to be unable to be as involved in that technical community as much as I once was. At the same time, it seemed like I wasn’t making much of a contribution since I’ve not been around much.
There’s really one more thing I know: while I can’t know or control the future, but I can know and control myself and in that, I can at least influence the future.
Warning: Niether technical nor topical, and not for the non-hunting population...
"Meat recovery was very reasonable for this 120 yard shot. Although the holes look big, there was very little extended meat damage."
http://www.buckstix.com/howitzer.htm
Mead, of course, meaning fermented Honey beverage. Mead DAY is an invention of the Association of Home Brewers to encourage the drinking of Fine Meads. More details at http://www.beertown.org/events/meadday/index.html. We don't make Mead, too complex, but it's likely that we'll being enjoy some ourselves.
Yes, I did type it wrong the first time. Mead wasn't invited the AOHB, but Mead Day was. Mead seems to be older than recorded history, so I'm sure the Mead God(s) will forgive me for the word-o.
One of my role models, Poet Laureate of the United States was recently interviewed on the Bob Edwards show. Its now available on Audible for free. Absolutely worth downloading and giving a listen to.
http://www.audible.com/adbl/store/welcome.jsp?source_code=RSSW0001RF031805&entryRedirect=/store/product.jsp&entryParams=^productID~FR_BOBE_050728
For beer in general: http://goodbeershow.com/. For us Craft Beer fans too, as it turns out: http://www.craftbeerradio.com/ and, if you brew your own: http://www.basicbrewing.com/radio/
It seems that I’ve been on a philosophical tear as of late. Sorry, folks, tonight is no different. If you have little stomach for it, click next now.
Listen to the words of the Buddha, contrast two teachings: "Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it” with “not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” On the true path, these are the same truth, there is no conflict between them. You must give your heart to your work only in the present moment, not to dreams nor to history.
This truth has been hard for me to follow but today, it revealed itself fully. I have been only seeing a dream for many months now. A dream that I have finally come to realize cannot come to pass. Worse yet, this dream has corrupted my view of the true world I live in, preventing me from giving myself fully to it. With this revealed so clearly to me, I am forced to give myself to the present moment and forced to rediscover my world and my place in it.
What that dream was is not the concern. It might just have well as been that I am but a frog on lily pad as anything. The real point is that I've let too much of myself live only for that dream; that I've made it too important to me and that I've lost myself from the present moment – the truth – because of that. The lesson to be learned is that am I no more that frog than I am the lily pad. The best thing I can do now is to return to work of discovering my real world.
"Through zeal, knowledge is gotten, through lack of zeal, knowledge is lost; let a man who knows this double path of gain and loss thus place himself that knowledge may grow." |
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National Geographic got me all excited. And yes, all of the women of the village were fully clothed.
9,000-Year-Old Beer Re-Created From Chinese Recipe
Ugh. Here I went and got all excited to think that there might be some new (well, new to me at least) style of beer to try. And, after all, I do like me some Alt Bier. And you'd be hard pressed to find a beer style more "Alt" than 9,000 years old any place. But alas, nothing to see here.
Repeat after me: the source of the primary fermentable sugar in beer is Barley malt, AKA Maltose.
Yes, I know: I'm sounding all Reinheitsgebot-ish about that. Yes, you can make a fine beer from Wheat malt too. I'm not going to argue that. Same for Rye and to a lesser extent, many other cereal grains. Some exceptions, however, exist. A malt liquor with a primary fermentable sugar of Rice isn't beer, it's Sake. Not that there's a thing wrong with Sake, I love that too.
And if the source of primary fermentable sugar is Honey, that's not been either, that's Mead. Mead is also great, but its not beer. Grapes? Wine. Fruit? Whatever. Corn? Down that path lies Whiskey and other hard spirits. But not Beer.
And neither is this.
James Doohan passed last night. Here's my condolences to his family, and my thanks for sharing him with us.
I remember getting to meet Mr. Doohan a few years ago at a Star Trek Fan convention here in Omaha. Warm, funny and completely at ease with who he was, the way it seemed. We mostly talked about drinking Scotch though, and he got me started on drinking some of the better stuff.
I'm sure there's going to be lots of tributes talking about the influences that the character Mr. Doohan is best known for playing influenced peoples lives. And I'm sure it had something with me wanting to go into the sciences, math and engineering. But for me, my all-to-brief time with him taught me something more important: that it's okay just to who you are even when you're the star on the stage. It is a lesson that I'm mastering to this day.
Well, that and let's face it, who hasn't had to drink something simply because "it's... green."
Today's the big day: Janell (aka, the Queen, the Boss, Miss Mulcahy if
you're nasty) and I get to start moving into our new house!
More pictures soon, but I thought you might enjoy a little Orbital View of the area.
First business first this morning: congrats to me and my
darling Janell, as we will soon be first time home owners! Found out about 3:00
EDT yesterday at an offer we made on a house in Northwest Omaha had been
accepted and we’ll be moving. Personally, I couldn’t be happier about this: the
house is huge and the yard is larger still. Seriously, it’s big enough that we
could have a very serious Pig roast in the backyard and still have plenty of
room inside for those for those not so interested in braving the heat.
But most of all, I’m very proud of Janell who to the endless
hours of hunting, researching and doing the paperwork; who navigated the Byzantine
system for getting the mortgage loan and who, I must say, can really wowed me
with her ability to stay on a task that’d be far to skittish about to make a
good go of it.
More news and photos as they develop.
Okay, so have I been punked or was really supposed to be Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? I'm only asked because the movie I saw this afternoon was titled "Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy." And it characters had the right names. And the Vorgon Poetry was, in fact, pretty awful. Beyond that, though, the current Hitchhiker's movie seems like something about as distant from the original work as the Starship Troopers movie did. Well, may be it wasn't quite that far gone. Too close for comfort, though.
Low lights: The romance between Arthur and Trillian was way over played. Cheesy. Zaphod styled as a Zapp Brannigan Pez dispenser. Hideous. The "Point of View Gun?" They really should have called it "the utterly useless plot device." As if. Worst, all too frequently I found myself thinking "WTF!" instead of "Wow, this is great."
But what really pained me was the lack of parts of the story that Adam's detoured us of on that made the whole thing so complete absurd as to be completely enthralling. None of that -- other than maybe the Whale and the Bowl of Petunias -- was to be found at all in this movie. Everything was about moving the movie, not the plot, along.
Highlights: Thread Arthur vomiting. Priceless. Classic Marvin -- the one from the BBC series -- standing in line. Good tribute to that series. And Mos Def doing a great job as Ford, I thought. And I don't know if they could have found a better voice for the Honda Asimov meets an iMac form of Marvin that Warwick Davis.
The ending made it all too clear that this was just a setup for next movie. That's just too depressing, because if its as unfaithful to original as this was, it would rather clearly be the movie at the end of the franchise for me. And the probability, sadly, of that, seems to be 21.7 million to one. $27.1 million dollars, that is. Normality is over rated.
But in the end, this Marvin had the zinger for this movie, when they found Magrathea: "Incredible... it's even worse than I thought it would be."
Went to see Revenge of the Sith last night. Disappointed, am I.
No, the movie is exactly what I expected -- and that's the problem. Anybody that ever knew any knew anything about the back story knew exactly where this was going to end up as soon as Palatine showed up on screen back in Star Wars I. Completely predictable was it.
Doesn't mean it wasn't the best movie of the series, though. I thought it was. Its just that there were no surprises. None at all. A two and half-hour ride through our expectations. Even the Droid War, Even the turn -- all predictable. Scripted. Yes, Lucas got to make his dream movie. But something isn't right: Skywalker turned too easily, and that's why I was disappointed. The writers failed to really make the best of the storyline they'd been handed.
Skywalker turned to the Dark Side for a number of reasons, but clearly, to save a single life was at the top of list -- not his own, of course. I think I understand love, and certainly, I would gladly give my own life for those I love. And the movie certainly plays on this. But there's a watering down of the story too. One thing that stuck out for me was Skywalker's utter indignation when we has made a member of the Jedi Council. This element -- that he had been wronged by Jedi -- was completely out of place and unneeded. Worse, it made moving the plot along all that much more awkward. Anybody that would have been ready to elevated to that level would have clearly understood why the council did what they did and would have agreed. And any fully realized Jedi wouldn't have reacted the way that Skywalker did to it. So it seemed completely artificial then, to have this be part of the reason that Skywalker turned. Instead, it simply acted as "plot sugar."
There's other problems too. Why did the fight with Windu so age the Sith master when fighting Yoda barely phased him at all? Well, that one is clear -- foreshadowing that whatever happened to the master would, eventually, happen to Vader. Why not wipe R2's memory as well? Did it really take 20 years to build the first Death Star, but only the span between "Empire Strikes Back" and "Return of Jedi" to build a second? If Vader really did feel it was his Empire, why didn't he immediately kill Sidious? After all, the big reason for the turn was gone. What was left to learn that would have motivated Vader to keep him alive?
And I hate to say this, but the Wookies became simply the next Gungans or overstuff Ewoks, if you'd rather. Yet, they supposedly important enough to warrant Yoda become personally involved in their defense. Why?
These aren't so much plot holes as they are things that could have been added to the story to give it more fullness. Or least an element of surprise.
Maybe Obi-Wan put it best, though: Wait a minute. How does this keep on happening? We're smarter than this!
Okay, so I'm not much of a hardware geek anymore. Sure, in my day, I knew... stuff... like MCA wasn't the architecture of choice for me. Now days, I'm pretty much “if its not USB, I don't wanna touch it.” So imagine my plight when I got a 512mb laptop for working with Studio 2005 and SQL 2005. Sure -- they both work -- but if your going to be debugging and stuff with the beta builds, you want more than 512mb.
I took a chance that I could do it myself. Started out with Crucial's website and their analyzer tool. Now, I knew I couldn't affort the 1gb stick today -- which it recommended -- so I ordered the 512mb one. It came one time and well packaged. The instructions were right to point too. So in about 30 seconds, it was all over but the first reboot.
And the price was good and ordering online was easy, so -- at least thusfar -- its been a good experience for me.
How cool is that!
Want to learn more about SQL Server 2005 Express Edition? You can now download my SQL Summit presentation directly from Microsoft at:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=f07fd0b0-ef37-47d2-83a0-6415e63048cb&displaylang=en
Of course, its also available from:
http://www.gosqlserver.org/ssx20050331.zip
Let's see how long it takes to get spammed again...
But I might feel better if I was. Between having a Cold and putting together presentations for InfoTec next week, I've just been too busy to do any good blogging. But there were three good April Fools pranks worth noting:
Since today is my last day at HDR, I did what everybody else does... moved out of my cubical. On the cool side, I got to leave about 50 book behind for folks to take as they wanted since I won't have room for them going forward. On the downside, I still took three and a half good sized boxes out to the wagon to take home and elsewhere. My arms already ache from that and I still have to unload them.
But on the positive side, its my least favorite chore done... and hopefully it can stay done for a while.
Then what are you waiting for? Go apply at HDR! There's an opening for my former position now on-line.
And no, I'm not kidding. HDR has been a great company for me to grow with and I think it could be an ideal place for many of the folks I know. If you like working with a great group of smart, friendly and caring folks on interesting projects that make a difference to the enterprise, this is a great opportunity.
In the last week, it feels like I've had to delete over 100 spammy comments and since I'm going to away from the computer for most of the next week, I'm left with little choice but to turn comments off again. Sorry about that guys. Hopefully things will considerably improve when Donny and Doug get done with the Community Server Upgrade.