The Time Sink

Good morning and welcome to another work week for those not on vacation. ...like Shelley and I want to be so bad we could just spit! Ah well, give us another week or two and we'll try to get out of Dodge again for a bit.

...and this wouldn't be the week to try to leave central California anyway: they're talking 90F weather all week! Yeehaw! That beats the 106F stuff last week (with 60F dew points; thanks for the lesson John!) that left me wasted every time I tried to do any physical labor outside. The only things we have scheduled this week are two nights of soccer camp for Daniel; maybe I'll be able to get started on last weekend's projects.

Speaking of Linux, I stuck up a bit about Linux on mainframes last night. I found it interesting which firms had already made the leap.

It's been a longish day. ...and a longish week so far. Yeah, and only Tuesday... Nicely broken up by an email exchange with Matt. I think I've come to the conclusion that Matt and I should never, ever be allowed to get together near anything that resembles a tech bench. Stories later...

...cause another guy I shouldn't be allowed to get together with for fear of the Four Horsemen being unleashed just to prevent it is John Dominik. ...and John has a story to tell you that comes from his very big heart. Have a read... Yeah, it's a long one; John doesn't do 'short'. So "pull up a stump" as we say on the Daynotes circuit and spend a few minutes reading about how things used to be.

There were giants in those days...

Nicholas Van Rijn, Dominic Flandry, Hokas, There will be Time, Psychotechnic League... His SiFi works were an 'automatic buy' when I discovered 'the other worlds out there' around 1961 or so. Jerry said it best, "We don't do Viking funerals any more. We should."

Pax...

...and Peace also to Frank Willison of O'Reilly. Unexpected; and after reading some of his lighter stuff in Tim O'Reilly's memoriam, a person to be missed greatly by his friends and associates. An excerpt:

On Desk Fountains as Xmas Gifts
"They were meant to reduce stress, but I think they make people want to take a leak all the time. What could be more stressful than that?"

Another:

On The End of the World, and Yes, It's Nigh

"Partway through Elliotte Rusty Harold's talk about namespaces, I realized where this relentless drive toward abstraction was taking us. Every new level of abstraction draws the computer-based world closer to the concepts we talk about in the real world. We've moved from waves to bits to data to information to infosets to application objects. As this process continues, some ambitious Comp Sci graduate student will realize that somebody already created the tree structure mapping the highest level of reality. That person was, of course, G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel's dialectic led him to create a map of reality that, at the top of the tree structure, divided everything into either the material or the spiritual realm. That dichotomy was resolved in God, and, my friends, that's about as far as you can go.

"That ambitious Comp Sci grad student, eager to get his Ph.D. and begin making real money, will create The Two Final Infosets: MatterML and SpiritML. Then, late one night, as rain falls in torrents and lightning flashes outside his laboratory windows, he'll run XSLT to transform the material world to the spiritual world. We'll be gone. The last material object on earth will be that graduate student's open copy of XML in a Nutshell. It makes an editor in chief proud, in a perverse kind of way."

Coupla' old friends came to visit over the last few days... I kicked them out as soon as I recognized them<g>.

First through the door was Snow White and the seven maybe nasties. ...nasties if you open up the attachment and find the worm. ...and it's not the one at the bottom of the bottle. The fix is detailed on the link.

That one showed up at home and then later yesterday on a machine at work. The end user had opened the same email a few month's back... IT is suggesting training on long term memory retention techniques.

The winner for the day, and the one that took me out of purchasing mode and over to the dark side for a time, was last week's winner: SirCam. I'd posted a warning on the alternate site (scroll down to the 23rd) last week since that one didn't die out like they thought it would. Well, it came zipping back through the Net again today. ...and its "social engineering" proved most effective as it sailed right through the warnings IT had passed along: "But it was from someone I knew and it said it had an attachment." Sheesh. ...at least Janeen caught herself as she clicked on the attachment, "Dan, I just did a bad thing..."

How did I get involved? Daynotes... Pure and simple. I was more informed on it than IT was. ...and knew where to find the fix. So... I hit Janeen's machine and one other while the IT minion took care of other business (she earned a break in my book after her comment yesterday). ...and all the while, Janeen is trying to explain to the person whose machine sent the two packages why his "Sent Items" folder didn't show any activity (she's a very quick study), "Dave, this thing has its own email system; it didn't use Outlook to send!"

...and then I get home to find a copy in my Inbox a little later in the evening. I returned the the gentleman's file with a note saying he was infected and included the URI for the fix.

It's Friday! ...and, as usual, I'm ready for the weekend. ...although it won't be a 'get something done' weekend; it's scheduled for more of a 'kick back and not push it' style.

The reason for the enforced kickback is that I'm cooking tomorrow for several couples from church. ...and Sunday we'll be working on getting the kids back from Grandpa and Grandma (farmed out so we can actually think as we get ready to entertain). ...and trying to plan anything around either of those events would be just plain silly. Oh, I'll likely do some gardening whenever I'm outside, but tackling the rebuild of the NT box isn't even on the radar. Which reminds me I need to post some information on another hardware routing solution for the dialup crowd...

...and for those wandering in here from dangerousmeta!, garret is referring to my Blog comment about his comment about his feathered alarm clock yesterday. ...and if you don't follow that, don't break a sweat<g>; we just Poeking fun at each other.

Speaking of silly, I sent this link showing an amateur rocket on a real decent test stand to Matt for evaluation... He suggested I discount his response: since my first reaction to the picture was "ooo, pretty!" I should have known what would happen when he saw that plume...

Dinner went well... I think I'm finally getting enough of a feel for cooking on The Beast to be able to deal with variations in the amount of 'load' in the cook chamber. Today I started off with about at third again more meat than I've used before. ...and managed to work my soaked wood chunks against the fuel in the fire chamber well enough to turn out a product that was thoroughly cooked and just as thoroughly moist. People seemed pleased anyway...

Whew, I'm glad that roller coaster ride is over...