Randomness from days gone by...
I was coming home from work the other day on my motorcycle when I felt a significant THUNK on my chest. I could only hope it was an acorn or rock rather than bird poo.
Friday night I had an interesting discussion over whether men or women have better orgasms. Funny enough, all the guys said "women", and the one chick shook her head "no".
I've been getting pretty involved in Earthdawn, a D&D-like fantasy role-playing game. It was originally done by FASA (of Shadowrun and Battletech fame) but was later sold to Living Room games and some other company. It's been good relaxation at the end of the week to go hang out with some college kids and not worry about crap like work.
I was reading an
interesting series of blogs linked from
Slashdot about the new OpenSolaris initiative and why Sun isn't interested in becoming Linux. I think the blogs speak for themselves, but it makes me itch because I'm in the middle.
I've been working on Solaris since 1996 and Linux since 1997; while I moved over to Linux for many years because of cost and hardware, I wanted to move back to Solaris because I saw it providing better job opportunities in an enterprise size company. I was right. However, my group (in one of almost monthly re-orgs) was joined with another where they were almost exclusively Linux (they had two sparcs to handle a Solaris only tool). Some viewed me, down their noses, as a "Solaris guy" who had some beef against Linux. I didn't, considering I'd been administering it for years, just not in my current job.
I find it extraordinary that many Linux/OSS/FS zealots take potshots at me because I'm primarily a Solaris admin; at other times, I've been labelled a Linux/OSS/FS zealot by others for exposing my opinions. How funny to be yelled at by both sides when one refuses to be an extremist.
So I looked at those blogs this morning and I find myself siding with the Solaris guy; not because I think he is 100% right or because I believe Solaris is 100% "The Answer", but because he accepts that
Solaris is better at many things. Linux is better at many things. The Linux kernel developer seemed far less accepting.
Nothing is ever the all powerful Oz.
Solaris and Linux both have their place. The GPL is a wonderful license and I use it often, but I recognize that it has failures, some of which
Eric Schrock lists. At some point in the future the GPL may be the yardstick which everything else is measured against, but today it is not. People must recognize this.
Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war.
I was reading an
article in Newsweek about Germany and the Auschwitz trials, and the author mentioned more recent war crimes, including "Lieutenant Calley at My Lai". I thought I recognized the name (or more likely the rank and context) from a story my father had told me.
Lieutenant Calley murdered (directly and ordering subordinates to follow) hundreds of civilians at
My Lai 4.
I believe
General Norman Schwarzkopf once said, "Isn't all war a crime?"
I think people make the mistake that when they see something like
Abu Ghraib, they compare it to events like My Lai or
Auschwitz and shrug it off as inconsequential. It's not inconsequential; it may be incomparable, but that's entirely different. Abu Ghraib is also incomparable to proper military proceedure and accepted international law. Killing one person is incomparable to killing 8 million. Torturing dozens is incomparable to torturing tens of millions. Neither action is ever inconsequential.
A friend of mine turned me on to
Wikipedia, a community edited encyclopedia. I find it's knowledge invaluable in matters of fact and today I was able to help it become more complete: I added some information about
Tiger Force, a commando unit who also committed attrocities during the Vietnam war.
Knowledge is a more powerful gift than any toy or jewelery.
Re-use, Recycle, Renew
We were cleaning up the house today and I came across my last pair of sneakers. I'm not sure why I kept them around, but I think it was mostly as a garbage pair in case I needed to do yard work or something. Unfortunately, they leak and I've been using my work boots anyway. I'm loathe to throw out anything that can be recycled, so I did some searching online.
After searching recycle+reebok+sneakers, I came across a mention about Nike's
Reuse-A-Shoe program. It didn't have a link, so I searched for nike+"reuse-a-shoe"+recycle and BOOM I got a direct link. The big Nike store at Phipps Plaza (one of the major malls, downtown) accepts individual donations. Very, very cool.
Isn't technology great?
We cannot find the remote for our DVD player. While we've been able to watch some of our DVD's using the buttons on the front of the player, it only has the barest (play, stop, next, previous, pause) and some discs won't play properly.
Isn't technology great?
I also got a 12" IBook to play with. I've wanted to play with MacOSX, but I've been relunctant to get into a new operating system. It's interesting, though it has far less of a Unix underpinning than I believed. Accounts aren't even added to /etc/passwd. Freaky.
GMail is the hottest new thing. I emailed the forsale list at my company to offer the six invites I had; they were claimed within 15 minutes. This morning, I got six more, so I invited the three people who asked me too late yesterday.
Late musings...
Three in the morning is always a good time to start something new.
My original MindSpring t-shirt brought luck today: I ran into three friends who used to work for the company. Other than that, the day pretty much sucked.
