When I started my first company in 2002, I had a lot of previous employers to provide examples, both positive and negative, of how to run a business. At the time IBM and Hewlett-Packard were leaders in network management, so I could have modeled my business on them.

Instead I modeled it on Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.

Many might think it was a strange choice, but it seems to have worked out well, at least for us.

First, they make a good product. This is of paramount importance in any business.

Second, they limited the amount of money the highest paid people could earn in salary. In their case, the highest paid person could not make more than seven times the lowest paid person.

I am constantly disgusted by executive salaries these days. Being a previous employee of NORTEL, now in bankruptcy, I find it highly ironic that the executives responsible for driving the company into the ground received huge retention bonus to keep them from leaving. In a just world they would have had no where to go, and particularly they would not be financially rewarded for poor performance.

To me a salary should exist to cover the basic necessities of living, but the real compensation should be based on the performance of the company. Let me stress that I want there to be no limits on overall compensation – if the company is doing well I want everyone’s “upside” to be unlimited. But getting a huge salary just for showing up feels wrong, especially if the company is doing poorly.

Steve Jobs, one of the most successful CEOs ever, takes home a salary of just $1.

Back to Ben and Jerry’s. The one other thing they did that I admired was to donate a certain percentage of pre-tax profits to charity.

I like donating to charity, but I find that I am most eager to give to those organizations that are a) small and b) concerned directly with something I care about. Thus each year I give to the EFF, the FSF and the SFLC, plus a number of local charities.

When the earthquake in Haiti happened, we were shocked and saddened like most of the world. I wanted to help, but I wasn’t sure how. Luckily, the opportunity came in a most unexpected way.

Matt and Jeff (along with Alex) were hanging out in the OpenNMS IRC channel (#opennms on freenode.net) when a man named Andris Bjornson joined and started asking questions about OpenNMS. It turns out that he works for an organization called Inveneo that supplies bandwidth in rural and under-served areas in the developing world. Haiti was the perfect example of a place that needed their services, since a lot of the relief effort is run by non-government organizations (NGOs), and they rely on communications in order to maximize the good they can do.

Haiti’s communications infrastructure, such as it was, was destroyed by the earthquake, and Inveneo is using wireless technology to provide a timely replacement. Of course they need some way to manage this infrastructure (as you can imagine, it is in high demand) and they chose OpenNMS.

Andris installing an antenna in Port au Prince (click for more pictures)

Andris has been using OpenNMS for awhile, but he had some questions and there were some issues in managing the radios they were using. The guys in the channel were more than happy to help out, but we wanted to be involved in a more formal way.

We decided to donate a commercial support contract to Inveneo to help them out in Haiti.

It’s pretty cool to be involved, at least in some small way, with getting Haiti back on its feet. It was also cool to have OpenNMS chosen from all possible apps out there to play a role.

You can read more about Inveneo and OpenNMS in this press release, and please consider donating to their efforts.

Open source has a large social component, and I have a theory that being involved in open source software makes one generally more interested in social issues. I want to hear from others about their experiences with social causes tied to open source. Jon “Maddog” Hall is also a fan of Inveneo, and I’d love to have more examples.

UPDATE: Here’s a network diagram of the Inveneo network, and the “How to Deploy” document mentions us by name.

Universal translator coming soon?  This is just too cool.

via Google leaps language barrier with translator phone – Times Online.

Wow. I just saw Tom Fetzer on TV and boy is he not looking well. I know it’s been a long time since Fetzer wreaked havoc on Raleigh as its mayor but, damn, the years have not been kind to him.

I hope his serving as the state GOP head still lets him get in some tennis because it looks to me like his health may be suffering.

Firstly, lots happening on the Ubuntu 10.04 audio front:

* daily builds of stable alsa-driver snapshots (thanks, Brad!);
* massive alsa-lib and alsa-plugins debugging (thanks, David!);
* continued alsa-driver/linux quirking;
* uploads of latest stable alsa*, libsdl1.2 (including direct seeding of the pulse backend in the Ubuntu desktop seed), openal-soft, and pulseaudio source packages;
* re-addition of HDA power down for Sigmatel/IDT in pm-utils-powersave-policy 0.3.

Some very positive Canonical goings-on have occurred, too, but that's the purvey of others. Also importantly, fellow community members are stepping forward to help triage Ubuntu audio bugs. You gals/guys are too numerous to list individually, but rest assured that your efforts (even if you're new to bug triaging!) are much appreciated. Thanks for helping make Lucid rock!

Secondly, John Poelstra recently wrote a fantastic piece on chairing effective meetings. The points are so entirely lucid (bad pun I know) that I can't believe that I hadn't used them!

In fact, the revitalized DistrictOfColumbia LoCo team meetings have begun using them. Brian has been doing a bang-up job posting summaries in lieu of a configured mootbot to keep us accountable. Members of the LoCo team are working on a screencast/video to demonstrate archive-uploadable activities at jams using Bug Hugger, Lernid, and Ground Control. I'll be doing a portion on fixing alsa-driver/linux bugs.

• New laptop #
• There are somethings that I don't want to earn #

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The recent snow and ice event started up the predictable office debates about “people just not knowing how to drive in this weather.” It didn’t matter that some of these driving “experts” complained of people driving too fast and some complained of people driving too slow: no matter what the other driver clearly was in the wrong.

The late, great comedian George Carlin once observed that anyone driving slower than you is an idiot and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac. It’s true: we’re quick to judge other drivers by our own driving. This leads to all sorts of problems, not only for your judging someone else but for the driver you are judging.

I think some drivers take this criticism to heart when they overhear it and try to adjust their driving to accommodate these views. The result is a driver who drives outside of his or her comfort zone, which is where the real danger begins.

As for me, I don’t care whether you drive too fast for my tastes or too slow for my tastes (though I prefer, uh, slower), just as long as you drive within your comfort zone. If you stick with what you know both of our trips will go more smoothly.

The Navy: it’s not just a job, it’s an adventure, as the advertising went. In truth it’s a job and so much more. How does one fit the “so much more” into a post about jobs? How does one choose to take on such an adventure?

It was the fall of 1987. I was a recent high school graduate working part-time at the local hardware store. Most of my friends went off to college, beginning adventures of their own. The thought of college didn’t excite me – the thought of becoming a future cube dweller didn’t excite me – and I put zero effort into applying. Still, I knew I was missing out on something and I wondered where I would find my adventure. I felt very alone at that point in my life.

My parents prodded me to enroll at the local community college but I wasn’t thrilled at that prospect, either. They then suggested the military, and without many other adventurous opportunities it began to sound appealing. My brother Allen had joined the Army earlier and seemed to be liking it. Why not look at the Navy?

It wasn’t just the fact that my brother was in the Army that made me consider the Navy, it was the varied experience the Navy offers. What other military branch does the depth of things the Navy does? There are ships, submarines, helicopters, planes, Seabees, SEALS, and many others. I’ve always loved the sea and felt at home on the museum ships I’d toured. From a practical perspective, yes I might get sent into harm’s way, but at least I’d be taking my bed, air-conditioning, and decent food with me. Six months at sea? Sure, it’s a long time but I was single with no kids. Nor was I in a hurry for a long-term relationship. The Navy sounded like something I could do. And hey, didn’t Top Gun just come out?

I called up a Navy recruiter by the name of Chief Norman Larson, a surface-warfare qualified gunner’s mate. I inquired about opportunities and asked about the education aspect of things, which Chief Larson happily answered. Then I politely said goodbye and hung up.

Only one does not easily end a conversation with a military recruiter! Not a good one, anyway. Chief Larson called me about once a week afterward, trying to talk me into visiting his office and taking the ASVAB test. I finally acquiesced and drove one afternoon to the Navy recruiting office tucked inside a Leesburg strip mall.

Chief Larson was a good salesman for the Navy. He answered my questions truthfully and shared some of his sea stories. He didn’t pressure me, but then again he didn’t need to. The tales of far-off places captured my imagination. It seemed the perfect antidote to suburbia. I soon agreed to take the ASVAB.

Taking the ASVAB involved a trip to Baltimore. I drove to the recruiting office where I met other recruits who would also be taking the test. An Air Force recruiter drove us all in a military van to the Baltimore MEPS station for our test. On our way home the Air Force sargent bought us beer at a convenience store, though I didn’t drink any. We were all underage and I thought it didn’t show much respect for the law. I was so square (though my sense of righteousness never stopped me from drinking at other times).

As for the test itself, I had already taken the SAT multiple times and the ASVAB proved no challenge to me. My test results showed I was among the smartest of recruits. Chief Larson suggested I consider nuclear power school. I thought that sounded like an exciting field – certainly not one for dummies. After a few weeks more of deliberation, I signed the enlistment papers, with entry into the Navy set for February 1988. I had set my course.

Only as the day drew closer I questioned my choice of nuke school. I wasn’t sold on the idea of serving on a submarine. All I’d known of submarines came from movies about World War II. I didn’t realize how much they’d changed. Knowing what I know now I would’ve loved sub duty but at the time I was a naive kid. I called Chief Larson and asked for a way out.

Being a recruiter means never taking no for answer, and Chief Larson was true to his profession. He agreed to change my specialty to something other than nuke school, something brainy but not involving submarines. I looked over the various specialities and found the job of cryptologic technician appealing. It was mysterious: even Chief Larson didn’t know the responsibilities of a crypto tech. It was something other than sub duty, though, and had a high bar for acceptance. I had my papers changed to become a Cryptologic Technician, Collection, and charted a new course.

The days ticked down. I said goodbye to my friends (and my girlfriend at the time) and prepared for the unknown. My parents drove me to the Baltimore MEPS station and dropped me off the night before. I didn’t know what to expect but I was on my way. I hopped out of the car and checked in with the man at the desk.

I don’t remember much about the MEPS process that night. It was a lot of waiting: the perfect introduction to military life. There were forms to fill out, and bad TV in the waiting rooms. They put us up in a local low-rent hotel. My roommate for the night was a small African-American kid of undetermined sexuality by the name of Bernard (“it’s ‘BUH-nard,’” he would always correct). He spent most of the night out partying while I tried to get sleep.
v
The next day began very early and included more paperwork, physical exams, and interviews. And waiting, lots of waiting. I do remember raising my right hand in the oath of enlistment ceremony, however. That was the first time I’d taken the oath. I’d find out later that it wouldn’t be the last.

After the folks at MEPS had done all they could do to me, they put me on a bus for a short trip over to the neighboring BWI airport, where I boarded a Delta flight to Orlando. Arriving after nightfall, I stepped off the plane to see a large crowd of recruits at one corner of the airport. After some checking around I found my group and headed out from the airport to Recruit Training Command Orlando: my new home for the next eight weeks. I did some minimal checking in before being assigned a bunk in a room full of snoring fellow would-be sailors. I slept fitfully, not only because there were only four hours until reveille but also because I couldn’t quite believe I was actually there, that my adventure had begun.

It had been a long day. Little did I know my long days were only beginning.

The Rain Song
Led Zeppelin

This is the springtime of my loving
the second season I am to know
You are the sunlight in my growing
so little warmth I’ve felt before.
It isn’t hard to feel me glowing
I watched the fire that grew so low.

It is the summer of my smiles
flee from me Keepers of the Gloom.
Speak to me only with your eyes.
It is to you I give this tune.
Ain’t so hard to recognize
These things are clear to all
from time to time.

Talk talk talk talk
I’ve felt the coldness of my winter
I never thought it would ever go.
I cursed the gloom that set upon us…
But I know that I love you so

These are the seasons of emotion
and like the winds they rise and fall
This is the wonder of devotion
I see the torch we all must hold.
This is the mystery of the quotient
Upon us all, upon us all a little rain must fall

So a few weeks back Ursula did some guest art for A Girl and Her Fed[1] of Dire Koala. Being the geek that I am, I was inspired to build stat blocks for it, as well as for the the Dire Eucalyptus and Dire Fire Ant included in the description. Hope you enjoy them, and if you think they need tuning, comment! As a bonus, you can click the images to get the .monster files for the D&D Monster Creator. Then you can unleash them against your players[2].

And, an update to the Dire Wombat :

[1] Are you reading AGAHF? Go! Do so now! I’ll still be here when you’re done. Yes, start at the beginning. DO IT! DO IT NOW!
[2] And for *MY* players, no you probably won’t see these in-game. Any time soon, anyway…

The OpenNMS Group has finally moved into double digit employee numbers with the hiring of Brad Miesner as our Vice President of Sales.

I know what you’re thinking – a sales guy? Earlier you post that you hired some folks to do marketing, and now you hire a sales guy?

First, let me point out that I’ve known Brad for over ten years and he started off in a technical role. So he’s not just some guy with no network management knowledge who’s going to pester people to spend money.

Second, interest in OpenNMS has grown to the point that it can be difficult for us to handle, in a timely manner, requests for information about our services. I always focus on our existing customers first, sometimes to the detriment of potential clients, but Brad will insure that our future clients receive the attention they deserve.

But most importantly Brad will have the role of “customer satisfaction manager”. We tend to build close relationships with our clients, and if we should happen to drop the ball, these clients might be a little hesitant to complain directly to the people at OpenNMS with whom they are working. Brad will proactively be in touch with all of our partners to insure that we’re providing the best service we can, and if there are ways we can improve, it is hoped he will hear about them.

Brad comes to us from Network Appliance, voted by Fortune Magazine as the number one “Best Place to Work” in 2009. He was doing really well there, and I think his decision to join our band of open source revolutionaries speaks well for both the company and our future sales prospects.

We are extremely happy to have Brad join our team.

Oh, at one time he worked for a little software company called Zenoss, but I think he’ll quickly adjust to working in open source.

(grin)

I’ve been checking the webserver logfiles here on MT.Net and note that a number of Google searches have brought people here looking for information on the Children’s House of Raleigh (CHR). Every time I discover someone else searching for that now-defunct school it makes me sad. Among other kids, our daughter got a great education at CHR. I felt a real kinship with the staff and other parents. Then the wheels came off. I’m not really sure what happened, but for whatever reason it just didn’t work out.

It’s tough to see something you poured love and work into come to an inglorious end.

So what do you do on a cold winter’s Saturday in Austin? Well if you are interested in Cloud Computing and IT operations you go to OpsCamp. This past Saturday was the first of what we hope to be many OpsCamps, held in an unconference format, to discuss ideas around next generation technologies and strategies for IT Operations.

The OpsCamp crowd was an eclectic crew of systems administrators, open source software developers, traditional software people, and service providers who came together to figure out how to address the needs of IT operations and the tools they use to administer virtual/cloud systems.

One Theme – Everything Old is New Again

I sat in on quite a few conversations most centered around two old themes: Monitoring and Configuration Management. While the problems are similar the landscape is changing. The use of the term devops was very prevalent noting that systems administrators are often required to have some degree of scripting and software development skills to adequately do their job. Effective systems administration goes beyond keeping servers running but the automation of tedious process to increase productivity. In the monitoring arena concerns centered around the amount of data we collect and how to make that actionable to assure consistent service levels.

Lightning Talks

The event started out with a word from the sponsors who had five minutes to talk about their products and services or otherwise woo the crowd. The main sponsors each took their shot at defining their interests in the cloud and how they could help during five minuted lightning talks. Presenters included Erik Dahl (CTO of Zenoss), Brett Piatt (Technical Alliance Manager at Rackspace Hosting) and Luke Kanies (Founder of Puppet and Reductive Labs).

Thanks to the other sponsors Bitnami, Opscode, Spiceworks and Redmonk who also helped make the event happen.

The Unpanel

Rather than having a meticulously planned agenda OpsCamp is interactive. During the Unpanel members of the audience got on stage and talked about what they thought would be interesting topics to discuss this included OpsCode CTO  Adam Jacob, Zenoss CTO Erik Dahl, Puppet founder, Luke Kanies, Travis Campbell from the University of Texas, Systems Administrator Matt Lawrence, Damon Edwards — President of DTO Solutions, Andrew Schafer and moderator extraordinaire — John M. Willis. This led to an interactive session with the rest of the OpsCamp attendees to address the following questions:

• What is DevOps?
• What is monitoring?
• How do you monitor/manage/apps/systems that use multiple environments
• Should I be listening to events or actively monitoring systems?
• Have you thought about monitoring from the cloud into your data center?
• What are the new things that need to be monitored?

The panel discussion was very interesting as well as the audience inputs. The session runs about 30 minutes but is pretty interesting to get the takes on cloud computing challenges from some exceptionally bright people.

Sessions

After quite a bit of discussion the sessions were decided on the following sessions:

• Agent Evolution – Do we need agents for management and if so are they going to be heavy, tedious and burdensome as the agents we have come to know and love.
• The Evolving Role of the Sysadmin
• Monitoring for the Cloud or Service Level Assurance
• Toolchains for Clouds
• Vendor “schmoozing” to talk about the products the vendors had to offer for cloud computing

The Organizers

Even though the conference was an unconference I think a big nod needs to go to my fellow organizers (or my co-conspirators) who worked together virtually from all over the country to pull of the event. Many thanks go to Damon Edwards (DTO Solutions and part of the Control Tier project),  John M. Willis (cloud guru from OpsCode) and Dave Nielsen (Founder of CloudCamp),

Videos and Pics

Damon has some videos from the day with Luke Kanies of Puppet and Reductive Labs and Bill Karpovich, CEO of Zenoss on the Dev2ops blog. We also have a bunch of pictures from the event in the OpsCamp Flickr group.I created an OpsCamp Twitter list for those of you looking for some folks who are smart on cloud computing and devops.

Keep your eye on OpsCamp.com for future events. I believe this one was one of many to be held around the world.

Related Articles

• Opscamp Austin Roundup (johnmwillis.com)
• OpsCamp Austin: IT Ops and the Cloud (cloudswitch.com)
• Videos: Luke Kanies, Bill Karpovich, Ernest Mueller at OpsCamp Austin 2010 (dev2ops.com)
• OpsCamp Debriefing IT Management & Cloud Podcast #66 (redmonk.com)
• Something about Austin #opscamp (austin.metblogs.com)

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, CloudCamp, Configuration Management, Open Source, Opscode, Reductive Labs, Zenoss

Linuxquestions.org is running a poll on the best open source projects and there is a network monitoring application category.

If you like OpenNMS, we’d appreciate your vote

We launched a new OpenNMS Group website this week and I am having a small problem. On the home page we have a jQuery script called Crossslide that rotates some pictures in the banner:

It works fine on Firefox, Chrome, Safari and IE8. It doesn’t work on IE7 and I have absolutely no idea why. I’ve reformatted the code, used both relative and explicit paths, and … nothing. No errors either.

I have no experience debugging Javascript issues within IE, so if you can help I would appreciate it.

This morning I was surprised to see that a spammer had apparently breached my Wordpress anti-spambot gauntlet. What does this mean in English, you ask? A potential hacker actually succeeded in registering an account on MT.Net, from which he could potentially attack my website.

At first I thought a bot had solved my CAPTCHA challenge, but after looking at the log entries it does not appear that this was an automated attack. Some dumb schmuck actually typed in the code by hand. That’s what most visitors to my website do, but most people don’t do it using email and IP addresses associated with hackers.

I’ve since turned on SABRE’s RBL lookup tests. This will automatically check the incoming IP against a list of suspect addresses. If there’s a match, the rogue visitor get automatically booted before he even begins.

It’s not perfect security, but one part of many defenses needed to protect a website.

Researchers have shown that people move faster when reacting to something than when they perform “planned actions”. The movements that took place when reacting to something took an average of 21 fewer milliseconds than a planned action.

Inspired by Hollywood westerns, scientists at the University of Birmingham (UK) tested this with a simulated shootout. Participants given buzzers and not given a particular signal as to when to buzz their opponent.

Dr Welchman explained that it took around 200 milliseconds to respond to what an opponent was doing, so, in a gunfight, the 21 millisecond reactionary advantage would be unlikely to save you.

“The person who draws second is going to die. They’ll die happy that they are the faster person to move but it’s not much consolation in this context,” said Dr Welchman.

I think this must have been a fun experiment to conduct. Makes me wonder if there is some mental process that gets overridden or short-circuited when reacting to something. Also makes me wonder if we can train ourselves to override this process at will, i.e. consciously put our minds in “turbo mode” when needed.

So I’ve mentioned before that I picked up a motorola droid recently for my new job and have been playing with it relentlessly. One of the many things I like to do with a moment of downtime is browse the android marketplace- lots of interesting things in there (I browse just the free section currently).

Anyways, in the marketplace is an app that looks like a star trek tricorder. When I first saw it, I downloaded it thinking it would be a neat little image display that I could taunt my friend The General with (he’s a big trek fan) when I see him later this year.

I didn’t expect the damn thing to actually *WORK*. Here’s a list of functionality from it’s site:

• GRAV: monitor the local gravitational field and acceleration
• MAG: monitor the local magnetic field
• ACO: acoustic analysis; waveform, frequency and sound level analysis of the ambient sound
• GEO: display geographical information
• EMS: scan the electromagnetic spectrum for radio signals — currently displays cellular and WiFi signals
• SOL: display current solar activity data — downloads current solar data in the background and displays it along with current images

So, there you have it- I have a working tricorder, beeps and all. It’s not that useful, really, but does it matter? HELLO! touch screen tricorder! Nerd, right?

Wait, it gets better. Jackie and I are looking at getting a bigger vehicle, and this weekend we plan on going for some test drives. One thing car commercials always say is “it’s such a smooth ride…” Well, now I have a way to MEASURE how the smoothness of the ride.

To repeat, I have a working tricorder that I plan on using for real world decisions.

This image? That was just me picking up the phone- it shows how much it was jostled. If I set that on the console as Jackie drives around the same area, it will give me an idea of how bumpy the ride will be. This is an actual *useful* application of the motion sensor if it was used in an app built for this purpose. Sadly, I don’t have the time to write it myself, so when we go for a test drive, I’ll use the tricorder app.

Now, picture it- Jackie and I are sitting in a new car with a salesman telling me how awesome his car is, and I’m sitting there, WITH A TRICORDER, going “BEEE-LOOP BOOPBEEP” while he’s trying to talk, monitoring how rough the ride is while he tells me it’s smooth.

So should I be stoked or embarrassed?

Clean up ("Expunge") Inbox on Exit

That was a switch in my email client Thunderbird 3 that I did not have checked because I wasn't sure what it was doing and I certainly didn't want my Inbox to be cleared every time I exited the software.  So I decided to do a search for it to see what I could find out.  Here's what I found:

When you delete messages in an email program ("email client") or move them to another folder in the program, they are not yet physically removed - even emptying the Trash does not remove them. Instead, Thunderbird and other email programs simply hide the "deleted" messages and mark them as ready for physical removal. The process of physically removing such no longer visible messages is called "compacting". This means that messages that you think you have deleted are not actually physically removed until you manually or automatically compact the folder they were (are) in.

This, to me, is a privacy and a security concern.  If you are following a policy of deleting sensitive messages after you have read them, you may only be hiding them from yourself and not actually deleting them.  This means that the messages are still out there and available for discovery.

So do some research and make sure your email client is doing what you want it to do.

I was stunned to read the extraordinary words of Iranian opposition figure Mir Hossein Mousavi today, where he essentially called for a new revolution. Mousavi said that tyranny was not rooted out during the 1979 revolution, implying that the current government is corrupt.

“Stifling the media, filling the prisons and brutally killing people who peacefully demand their rights in the streets indicate the roots of tyranny and dictatorship remain from the monarchist era. I don’t believe that the revolution achieved its goals,” Mr Mousavi added.

This guy is begging the authorities to arrest him, or worse. With the anniversary of the Iranian Revolution coming up on February 11th, Iran could be in for another round of civil unrest.

If you are involved in analyst relations you will find this funny.

Technorati Tags: analyst relations, Forrester, Gartner, Redmonk

I spent some time this evening writing some of my next installment of Where I’ve Worked, this one about my choosing to enlist in the Navy. It’s already longer than I anticipated but I want to get it right. That means unlike most of my posts here I’m actually putting these through a couple of drafts before posting them.

It also means I’m beginning to get intimidated by these posts because of the need to get them right. Like the saying goes, the longest journeys begin with the smallest step, and simply putting something down about my Navy days has helped considerably in getting this huge topic organized in my mind.

Enough for tonight, though. I may have something ready to read in the next night or two. Or not.

My resume says “does not wish to relocate.”

1) You’re calling me about a position in Iowa. I live in Michigan. It says Michigan on my resume. Right next to “does not wish to relocate.” You think I’m gonna bite? Even if (on the off chance) the job paid a small fortune… really? Iowa? IT’S WINTER! Michigan is cold, but at least there’s stuff to look at here. …Now, if it was in Tahiti you might get my attention.

2) Stop calling. You’re calling my wife’s phone and I’m working 3rd shift currently, so I’m a) not gonna get your call and b) not gonna call back if you’re calling about a job I said I wasn’t interested in. If I don’t return your call, I’m not interested. My resume already says I’m not interested. Evan, I’m looking at you. Stop calling.

3) Oh, and as a side note, you guys should get together and figure out a system of “one recruiter per resume per position,” because if I tell Dan “no thanks,” Gary, Ed, Frank, Little Joey, Hooch, Evan and Ringo aren’t gonna have any more luck. To the guy I spoke to on the phone, you’re cool; I was right there, you were non-obnoxious, and took no for an answer. The rest of you? You can stop now… not that I expect you to stop.

The funny part is I’m not actively looking for a job; I just never remove my resume from monster- never know when opportunity will come knocking; but it’s knuckleheads like these than make me want to take it down.

Remember how I said there was no Chinese word for OSHA? It turns out safety-conscious Chinese toy manufacturers continue to poison our kids, this time with cadmium:

In the study, the AP analyzed cadmium content in commonly available children’s jewelry and found most of the pieces had significant cadmium content. One of the pieces contained 91 percent cadmium. That’s not parts per million; that’s percent. That’s toxic waste.

This just goes to further my view that Chinese culture encourages one to cheat, just as long as one doesn’t get caught.

Last year was a pivotal year for the OpenNMS Group. In addition to having our five year anniversary, we finally hit a critical mass of customers that found us with some discretionary income. We used most of it to hire new people, but we felt it was time to actually spend some money on marketing OpenNMS.

In the past I’ve had a personal distaste for marketing. I always saw it as, well, something close to lying. For example, in my last post I talked about a company claiming its web site is “the epicenter of all open source projects that relate to IT monitoring” when it clearly is not.

But that is par for the course for many companies. They don’t have a story to tell so they have to make one up, or at least embellish the news they have. This is because their ultimate goal is to be purchased by a large company, preferably in a short amount of time, and so they have to seem bigger and more popular than they really are. Hence the emphasis on downloads and web site registrations, etc.

I count our success based on happy customers and money in the bank.

To me, a project is more successful that has 50 people who find it valuable versus one million who download it and never use it.

Our mission statement of “Help Customers, Have Fun, Make Money” has produced happy customers, and we’d like to have more. Specifically, we’d like to have more customers for whom OpenNMS is a great solution. As a services company it does us no good to have a client that is a poor fit. We just end up working harder for a client who can’t be made happy. We want to focus on getting the word out about the value of using OpenNMS to those people who most need it.

Enter marketing – a way to focus on introducing the value of our services to those who would truly value it.

Last year I hired two people to help us come up with (gulp) a marketing strategy. I am lucky in that they have turned out to be amazing.

The first was Phil Marsosudiro. I’ve known Phil for over 25 years. We met in high school at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. NCSSM is a two-year public residential high school for students to focus on mathematics and the sciences at a level not normally available in a public school environment. It was a great experience, and I met some amazing people – Phil being one of them.

Phil and I share the same philosophy when it comes to business. The idea is not to take as much money as you can, as fast as you can, from customers, but to instead create value for them that allows both parties to make money.

He brought Margaret Gifford to our team. Margaret is the first “real” public relations person I have ever worked with, and I am surprised someone of her background happened to be local. She’s been a Senior VP at Ogilvy and worked in corporate communications at Hewlett-Packard, among other things.

Together, they are a marketing dream team.

Since neither of them had a background in open source software, I had to tell them about our business. It was harder than I thought. When you work day in and day out in a particular field, you start making assumptions about what people know. To me using open source software is a no-brainer, but to the majority it is still somewhat of an unknown. Going through the exercise of explaining what we do and why it is valuable to people outside of the field was enlightening.

The first thing we focused on was why the heck would anyone need network management in the first place, much less open source network management. This literally took a couple of weeks.

What we came up with is that network management is a lot like maintaining an automobile. If you buy a brand new car and do little maintenance, it will run fine – for awhile. But without oil changes, new filters and keeping it clean it won’t last nearly as long as it could, and the investment made in buying a new car will yield a lot less than it should.

It’s the same way with computer hardware and software. Companies, at least successful ones, invest in information technology in order to provide some sort of productivity gains that should translate to the bottom line. But unless they have management, it is almost impossible to tell if it is providing value, and without the ability to tune it and detect problems, one can be sure any positive value will be less than what it could be.

Which is why they need OpenNMS. In Phil and Margaret’s words, the OpenNMS Group is there to “Get the Network to Work™”.

I know it sounds a little “sales-y” but that is at the heart of what we do. Papa John’s isn’t in the business of buying servers or building a website – they are in the business of providing quality food to their customers as quickly and easily as possible. The servers and the websites are there to enable that, but they aren’t the reason the company exists.

The next hurdle was to be able to tell people why an open source solution like OpenNMS was better than commercial software. I’ve known for years that OpenNMS was more powerful, scalable and flexible than things like Unicenter, Tivoli and OpenView, but how to get that across to people who haven’t “walked the path”?

Now a lesser marketing person would just put words up on the website claiming to be better. I could imagine seeing something like:

OpenNMS can expedite virtual paradigms and benchmark mission-critical technologies in order to grow ubiquitous solutions and visualize visionary experiences with the final goal to repurpose value-added experiences and harness magnetic relationships.

(I had help with that)

I hate stuff like this. Instead, Margaret insisted that the reasons to use OpenNMS and the OpenNMS Group should come from the people who use it and find it valuable, and not from the people who make it.

After months of hard work, I’d like to present the new OpenNMS Group website. While there is a lot of text describing what we do, the emphasis is on the stories from our customers. At launch we have been able to get two case studies approved, with many more in process.

The first is from New Edge Networks. If I had to pick a company that shared our dedication to helping customers and having fun doing it, New Edge would be at the top of the list. I’ve been able to watch them grow over the years, and OpenNMS has been able to grow along with it. In their environment, OpenNMS gathers data which is presented directly to their end users. At the moment this means data collection on over 160,000 interfaces. This is something that the most expensive commercial products would have trouble doing.

The second is Papa John’s Pizza. They were the first company to allow on-line ordering at 100% of their US stores, and OpenNMS makes sure that billion dollar business is working smoothly. We are now working on a project to extend that to manage all of their 3,400 stores worldwide and not just the data center.

But enough talking from me – read about it in their own words. These are the people that we help, have fun with and together we make money. We want to meet more.

Shouldn’t that really be the role of marketing?

I’ve been following the Southeast High Speed Rail project for quite some time now Last week, President Obama announced that $545 million is on its way to North Carolina to kickstart the rail project. That’s great news for the state.

The majority of the money will go to improve the track between Raleigh and Charlotte, which is the most used rail route in the state. There’s also $25 million to go to the project to revive the tracks between Raleigh and Petersburg. All in all, it’s a great investment in the future of transportation in North Carolina: rail travel!

While the twitter-verse and blog-o-sphere have been going nuts about the Amazon/Macmillon disagreement, I thought, perhaps, I should give out some GOOD news in books.

Speaking of signings! To celebrate the release of Ninja Frogs, I’m pleased to announce Ursula’s first official book signing in support of the release! It will be Feb 27 from 1-3pm at Chapel Hill Comics! Andy and his team run one of the best comic shops I’ve been in, and we’re always excited to have an event there. And as a bonus, he even made up this AMAZING banner for the event :

This coming weekend, we’re off to WTHCon 2010 – expect to see Ursula on panels, me in the Dealer’s Room, and both of us at the Geek Auction. But more on that later…

In spite of the massive snowfall predicted we wound up getting two inches last night – and even that stopped after 9 PM. After that the precipitation switched to sleet which pounded the house until mid-morning. The snow was only 1 1/4″ deep when the sleet hit it.

We woke up with snow-crazy kids, so when we had stuffed them with as much breakfast as we could (which wasn’t much), we turned them loose outside. After a while I wandered out and shoveled the back steps but quickly opted not to shovel the driveway as it looked like a losing effort.

Instead, we headed to our local Lions Park with our sled in tow, picking up a few neighbors along the way. We spent the next few hours sliding down the hill near the tennis courts, outlasting all of our friends.

After some lunch and naps, we hung out inside as the snow and sleet on the ground turned to ice. Then it was dinner and bed. Overall, a pretty fun day.

Freenode now has SSL on all the nodes, so I figured I’d switch our supybot to use SSL via the Twisted driver. Trouble looked like this:

INFO 2010-01-30T18:49:30 Connecting to chat.freenode.net:7000.
WARNING 2010-01-30T18:49:31 Error connecting to chat.freenode.net:7000: An error
 occurred while connecting: -9: Unknown error 18446744073709551607.

Which was confusing, to say the least. Thanks to themill in the #supybot channel, I found this bug report, which suggested that if I connect to a hostname that does not have any AAAA records, I should be fine for now. Simply changing our config from pointing to chat.freenode to chat.us.freenode did the trick. I could have also put a bare IP address in. Both are fragile, since apparently chat.us should have AAAA records, and of course a bare IP could be pulled from rotation. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.

A few weeks ago, Kelly sold Hallie’s ice skates through a Craigslist ad. The mother who picked them up from our porch left us an envelope with the money inside. On the outside of the envelope was the sketch you see above.

The sketch, it turns out, was drawn by her 14-year-old daughter, perhaps as a way to say thanks for the skates. Hallie has named the puppy Icey.

I think it shows quite a bit of drawing talent!

The snow has already begun falling here in East Raleigh and it may continue for another 24 hours. This is shaping up to be an insane amount of snow and any hopes of hitting the road for work Monday morning may be pure fantasy.

That may leave many Triangle workers stuck at home when they could be working. While some will play in the snow with their families others will try to work from home, firing up their connections to the office. This is when many of them will realize just how pathetic their so-called high speed Internet service is when it comes to upload speed. Those web conferences will crawl. That videoconferencing you hoped to do? It’s buffering … buffering … buffering.

While the major ISPs want to treat their Internet service like a one-way pipe, in reality it takes a speedy connection in both directions to bring the Internet to its full potential. Collaboration suffers when one side has its hand tied behind its back.

Yes, municipal broadband may seem expensive but consider the cost of hundreds of thousands of workers stranded at home, unable to work properly because of 1990s-era Internet policies.

A few months ago I blogged about a new site called “MonitoringForge.org“. It seemed to me to be a thinly veiled marketing attempt with little value, but I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt and time would tell.

Well, I was reading Coté’s blog today and read a link where they created a press release to trumpet their 2,000th registered member.

This struck me as funny because, in the same sentence, they state that there are “more than 2,000 projects” registered on the site.

Wah?

So, if only one unique member of each project on their site registered, there should be more than 2,000 of them, yet they have less than that, and this is considered news? Heck, we have nearly 1300 people on the opennms discussion list and we’re just one project, but with their site running at an average of less than one person per project I guess we’re doing pretty well. And while I’m sure that 80 or so of our subscribers are directly working on OpenNMS, that still leaves about 1200 end users.

I’ll leave the similar calculation for MonitoringForge as an exercise for the reader.

(sigh)

Now I’m not one to beat a dead horse, but when the “Chief Marketing Officer” is willing to issue a press release on a site she calls “the epicenter of all open source projects that relate to IT monitoring” with such, in my humble opinion, lame numbers, I’m willing to stand by my original impression that this is just a marketing ploy.

Am I wrong? Can anyone comment who found the site valuable? Inquiring minds want to know.

For the first time, I am participating in a St. Baldrick's event for cancer research. It's a great cause; I have family members and friends who are either battling with cancer, or are themselves survivors.

My goal is to reach $1000 in donations towards cancer research through the St. Baldrick's Foundation. If there's anything you can do to help, I would very much appreciate it, and there are many others out there who can benefit from your help.

Donate Here!

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I was attending a climate change forum in DC Wednesday and walked out of the Dirkson Senate Building for a walk during a break. As I’m waiting at the intersection for the walk signal, I notice I’m standing near a limo. Crossing towards the limo from my left walks Andrea Mitchell, whom I try to ignore. I have a pretty low opinion of national news media figures and certainly don’t look up to them (not after Walt passed, anyway).

In spite of my clear indifference to her, she offers a cheery hello. In fact, it was overly cheery, to the point of being … um, a little creepy. I could swear the wife of hall of fame former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan was hitting on me.

Now I don’t consider myself to be dazzlingly handsome and my man AG’s got more bank, but Greenspan makes me look like Tom Cruise. Regardless if her intention, though, it was a little disconcerting.

Today, the OpenNMS Group joined the ranks of other huge, profitable multi-national companies.

We got us a race car.

My friend Jason Tower has finally decided to get serious about driving, and he’s put together a Spec E30 race car. We were happy to sponsor him and we got the hood spot.

I really like the philosophy behind “specified” racing classes. The rules only allow for a limited number of modifications from stock, so while the car will always play a part in racing success, it is much more about the skills of the driver.

There is an analogy here with commercial vs. open source software. It used to be that just getting started as a software company required a lot of money. At a minimum you had to at least buy a compiler, if not expensive hardware on which to use it. This is similar to Formula 1 or NASCAR where teams require millions just to show up on race day, and the more money you have can directly relate to how successful you are.

Not so with Spec racing. Here all of the drivers are on equal footing and success is measured on merit, not how much money you have.

Open source has helped level the playing field. While having lots of money rarely hurts, today’s market is much more open. A group of people with great ideas and a good product can compete against much larger companies – and often win.

Now the pressure is on Jason – he’d better win. (grin)

UPDATE: This weekend’s race has been cancelled due to the snow storm (sigh).

So I did some digging around after giving my off-the-cuff lightning talk at TriZPUG tonight and it looks like some other ex-rpathers (Thanks Dugan and Gafton!) have forked epdb. There's also the the rPath tree synchronized from here but this tree is missing some of the latest changes. The dugan tree is "python setup.py installable" now, instead of using make, and some shortcut documentation has been created, so I don't have to make this post as long as I thought I was going to have to.

For those who didn't see my little demo, epdb is like pdb (the standard Python debugger), but it adds multi-line text input, history and tab completion, nested debugging from the debug prompt, shortcuts to introspecting code, and a very nice post mortem debugger. Last, but not least, it also contains a server and client for remote debugging. The docs are still pretty sparse, but hopefully more attention can help fix that. I'd also be happy to answer questions about it.

The weather this weekend promises to be exciting. Anytime forecasters face the chance of snow there’s a mad scramble to determine the amount and where it will fall. Too often the forecast is wildly off the mark, but the storm predicted for Friday evening will affect such a wide portion of the state it appears a sure thing that most everyone will experience something.

Greg Fishel said it’s highly unusual for a winter storm watch to be announced so far in advance. Precipitation estimates range from 3 to a whopping 11 inches! It will all come down to the wire Friday evening, but it seems certain that something will happen.

Here’s the latest winter storm warning message from the NWS:

URGENT – WINTER WEATHER MESSAGE
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE RALEIGH NC
937 PM EST THU JAN 28 2010

.A WINTER STORM WILL PRODUCE FROZEN PRECIPITATION ACROSS MOST OF CENTRAL NORTH CAROLINA FRIDAY EVENING THROUGH SATURDAY.

NCZ007>011-021>027-038>041-291000-
/O.CON.KRAH.WS.W.0001.100129T2300Z-100131T0500Z/
PERSON-GRANVILLE-VANCE-WARREN-HALIFAX-FORSYTH-GUILFORD-ALAMANCE-
ORANGE-DURHAM-FRANKLIN-NASH-DAVIDSON-RANDOLPH-CHATHAM-WAKE-
INCLUDING THE CITIES OF…ROXBORO…OXFORD…HENDERSON…
WARRENTON…ROANOKE RAPIDS…WINSTON-SALEM…GREENSBORO…
HIGH POINT…BURLINGTON…CHAPEL HILL…DURHAM…LOUISBURG…
NASHVILLE…LEXINGTON…ASHEBORO…PITTSBORO…RALEIGH
937 PM EST THU JAN 28 2010

…WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 6 PM FRIDAY TO MIDNIGHT EST SATURDAY NIGHT…

A WINTER STORM WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 6 PM FRIDAY TO MIDNIGHT EST SATURDAY NIGHT.

BASIS…A COLD FRONT WILL PUSH SOUTH THROUGH CENTRAL NORTH CAROLINA TONIGHT. DRAMATICALLY COLDER AIR BEHIND THE FRONT WILL SURGE INTO CENTRAL NORTH CAROLINA ON FRIDAY. A LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM WILL DEVELOP ACROSS THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI RIVER VALLEY ON FRIDAY…MOVE EAST ACROSS THE DEEP SOUTH FRIDAY NIGHT…THEN EAST NORTHEAST OFF THE CAROLINA COAST ON SATURDAY.

PRECIPITATION TYPES AND ACCUMULATION…SNOW ACCUMULATIONS OF 5 TO 8 INCHES ARE EXPECTED IN THE TRIAD AND NORTHERN PIEDMONT. SNOW AND SLEET ACCUMULATIONS OF 3 TO 6 INCHES ARE EXPECTED IN THE TRIANGLE. PREDOMINATELY SNOW IS EXPECTED ACROSS THE TRIAD AND NORTHERN PIEDMONT OF CENTRAL NORTH CAROLINA…ALTHOUGH A TRANSITION TO A MIX OF SNOW AND SLEET WILL BE POSSIBLE BEFORE PRECIPITATION ENDS SATURDAY AFTERNOON. FURTHER SOUTH IN THE TRIANGLE…ALL SNOW IS EXPECTED FRIDAY NIGHT…TRANSITIONING TO A MIX OF SNOW AND SLEET BY SUNRISE SATURDAY MORNING.

TIMING AND DURATION…PRECIPITATION IS EXPECTED TO OVERSPREAD THE WARNING AREA FROM THE SOUTHWEST AFTER SUNSET FRIDAY EVENING…CONTINUING OVERNIGHT AND THROUGH THE DAY SATURDAY BEFORE ENDING SATURDAY EVENING. THE HEAVIEST PRECIPITATION IS EXPECTED TO FALL
FROM MIDNIGHT FRIDAY NIGHT THROUGH MIDDAY SATURDAY.

IMPACTS…ACCUMULATIONS OF SNOW AND SLEET WILL SIGNIFICANTLY IMPACT TRAVEL ACROSS THE WARNING AREA. AFTER PRECIPITATION BEGINS LATE FRIDAY EVENING…TEMPERATURES ARE EXPECTED TO REMAIN NEAR OR BELOW FREEZING THROUGH MIDDAY MONDAY.

A WINTER STORM WARNING MEANS SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF SNOW… SLEET…AND ICE ARE EXPECTED OR OCCURRING. STRONG WINDS ARE ALSO POSSIBLE. THIS WILL MAKE TRAVEL VERY HAZARDOUS OR IMPOSSIBLE.

I stumbled upon something interesting today, it should have been obvious but still I found it to be quite a surprise. First, a bit of background. I have a friend that lives on the coast almost four hours away. For years I've administered her simple network remotely mainly via the single open port to the Internet (ssh). All device on the network, aside from the PCs she insists to use, could be managed via ssh or http. For the http hosts I've kept a Squid http proxy running and I'd connect to those devices via a ssh tunnel using port forwarding and for years this setup was "good enough". Plus it gave me a remote host on the Internet were I could redirect my http traffic should I be so inclined. There are drawbacks to this setup, first and foremost my DNS queries would be resolved on my local network and the http traffic would travel over the tunnel thus bypassing any http proxies, but the evidence of my trespass was still evident in the DNS queries. Granted this wasn't a problem as I was never going places I really shouldn't have been in the first place so it wasn't ever a concern.

The old command I used to use to connect to my Squid proxy was: http greg@myserver.remotenetwork.com -8080:127.0.0.1:8080. After the tunnel was set up I'd go into Firefox and set up the proxies under Network Settings to use 127.0.0.1 as the proxy IP address and 8080 as the remote host.

Flash forward to last week. The remote ssh host in question is an iMac desktop and during a recent trip I upgraded the iMac to Snow Leopard. This caused a few applications to seize, most notably Squidman, my old trusty http proxy. I left the beach without installing a new Snow Leopard friendly proxy. Whoops. I just wrote it down on the to-do list next time I needed a salt air fix, and being a business at the beach this is certainly what we can define as the "slow time" of the year and I wouldn't likely have a need to connect to any http hosts between trips in the first place.

It's true that I am an old network dog but I occasionally learn a new (old) trick and I did that this week. A discussion started over e-mail about proxies and what-not someone suggested using a SOCKS proxy which would do two things: resolve DNS on the ssh host, not the local network and redirect http/https traffic (among other cool things). I tried it out using the following command:

ssh greg@myserver.remotenetwork.com -D 8888

From there I set *ONLY* the Socks proxy in my Firefox network settings to 127.0.0.1 and port 8888 and, as if magic with no configuration of extra software on the iMac my http requests were redirected over my tunnel just like when I used to use Squid. Cool!

But here's where things got interesting. Because my DNS queries were also being redirected I could resolve addresses for IPv6 hosts, such as ipv6.google.com and m0n0.ch. Cooler yet was even though my machine was on an IPv4 only network I could reach IPv6 webpages via http. This was very cool indeed. Had I thought about this prior to today it should have been obvious this would have worked but it still surprised me and I'm happy to have the IPv6 connectivity and I just think it's cool that I can tunnel requests for IPv6 hosts when my laptop is on a network that only supports IPv4.

Give it a shot, it works pretty well.

The domain name opensource.org is owned by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), but Red Hat owns opensource.com. In talking to friends of mine involved with the OSI, people have been wondering what Red Hat will do with it.

Now we know. Today they announced that opensource.com has been launched with a new site.

It looks pretty slick and is worth a poke around. As someone who holds open source concepts near and dear to my heart, I am always eager to see how they are promoted. After all, we did register fauxpensource.com as a reaction to the dilution of the term “open source” but at first glance I’m pretty happy with what I see on the new site. Now if I could just find some time to participate.

I saw this on a ham radio swap site:

Hello to all,
I have a 1 week old MFJ-461 code reader and the matching MFJ-5163 cable. I purchsed this so my oldest grandson could see code being displayed in hopes he might get interested in our hobby. Its not going to happen- those darned useless videos games has all of his interests. Seriously, the code reader was used ONCE and works as it should.I have no use for it since I’ve been copying cw just fine for the last 40+ years. My loss your gain. Paid over $100.00 and will take $60.00 shipped in original packaging and my receipt from HRO in NH. I AM AND HAVE BEEN [callsign deleted] FOR A LONGGGGGGGG TIME NOW- AN OLD SCHOOL HAM AND PROUD IT.GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS DEFENDING OUR WAY OF LIFE….LETS NEVER FORGET THEM.

Thanks, gramps.  If there is one thing our young men don’t need, it’s for our older generation to act like old fogies and give on them.

I know that I haven’t posted in a while, but I needed to get that off of my chest.

At OpenNMS we are thankful that we have clients who believe in us and use our services. As a result, we also try to buy from them when we can. Our shirts come from Lands End (since Sears is a client). I always request a USA Today paper when I travel, since they’ve been using OpenNMS for years.

And we luvs us some Papa John’s pizza.

We’ve had three guys up to PJI headquarters in Louisville working on OpenNMS, but I’m the only one who missed out on a tour of the dough room (sigh). I did get to see the famous Camaro that you’ll see featured in some of the ads.

Anyway, this week is a training week, and I am in charge of getting all of the students fed at lunchtime. We don’t have a Papa John’s in town, but Phil was coming down through Chapel Hill and offered to pick up some pies.

Lucky Ihenyen at the Chapel Hill Papa John’s

I love training week, but man does it take a lot out of me. Yes, even I have a problem talking for eight hours straight. We have eight people in training, which is just one shy of our maximum of nine (we keep our classes small on purpose) so it has been a lot of fun with lots of great questions.

We have two guys up from Honduras, two over from Seattle, two down from Ottawa, one guy from Atlanta and a new hire who is local.

Everyone seemed to like the pizza, and it was fun ordering it on the web especially knowing that OpenNMS was insuring the service was working (and of course, it went flawlessly).

Remember – never re-heat pizza in a microwave as it will destroy the crust. Place it in a hot oven (350F) and wait until the cheese just starts to bubble.

Yum.

I can’t wait for the Super Bowl, as my party will be catered by Papa John’s (grin).

I’ve been asked about these for some time and in all honestly, I’ve been very slack about taking care of something I committed to do…

So, without further delay…

Here are photos comparing my body at a pre-Gastric Bypass state (7/6/2009) to 6.5 months out from Gastric Bypass surgery (1/25/2010). I’m still not happy with where I’m at and I still have 30-40 pounds hopefully left to go, but I’m thrilled with the progress so far…

Sorry the pics aren’t all from fully similar views, but this is what I’ve got to show…

Here are some additional stats

Waist size (Jeans)

• THEN 52-54
• NOW 40-42

T-Shirt Size

• THEN 3XL-4XL (3XL was typically too tight to wear, so 4XL was the size of choice)
• NOW 2XL

So I’ve had about 15 things to write about, but none of them have gelled yet, so I will regale you with a con report.

Ursula and I headed to San Jose, CA last Thursday so she could be Guest of Honor at Further Confusion 2010. After getting the usual review from the TSA, we had a VERY bumpy flight to Dallas, where we caught ANOTHER bumpy flight into San Jose. The con had sent a Limo for us[1], which was hella cool. When we got there, the GoH liaison showed to our suite[2], and we got settled in. And then it was time to get badges, find dinner, be at Opening Ceremonies, arrange con-kit pickup/delivery with Tugrik, and eventually pass out.

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday were just as busy. *grin*

High Points :
- Meeting the Fans. You guys are great. And being able to be at the Q&A session was a lot of fun. You guys are why we go to cons.
- Getting a chance to hang out with Tugrik for a bit, and see the work he and his friends are doing in their home techshop. Laser Engraved lucite? They can do that. Laser cut wood? He gave us a Mayan Calendar with Ursula’s Red Wombat in the center. It’s under 6 inches across, and the detail is AMAZING. Leather? Metal? Castings? They do that. AMAZING work. I was bummed I didn’t get to see their pannel on fabrication, and doubly bummed that I couldn’t get his crew and the EuroFurance crew together, since I think the EF guys would have loved the work.
- Meeting EmoBurd, one of the better characters I’ve read in a while.
- Being able to host artists[3] in the front room of the suite while they did their homework. Ursula had the idea that the space should be used for SOMETHING, since we weren’t going to use it, and I like to entertain. And I have this thing where I like to take care of artists, so…Plus I got a chance to get to know Waarhorse a little better (VERY cool guy), and hang out with LizardBeth [4]
- Dinner with Carlota, Alex, and Carl Saturday, Dinner with SofaWolf and BLOTCH on Sunday.

…And some things that will be told over drinks, or in the privacy of future artist rooms…

And then the flights home, including sharing a plane to Dallas & dinner in the airport with LizardBeth [5], who got the full Ursula and Kevin “I wonder what’s this way…” experience.

All in all, FC was a lot of fun, and we need to get back out to San Jose to hang out without the Con Madness.

[1] A Limo? Really? For Us? What the hell?
[2] A SUITE? FOR US? ARE THEY INSANE?
[3] Who dropped by Sunday to Violate my sketchbook. Again.
[4] Have I told you to go read her comic yet? GO READ HER COMIC!
[5] Have you read her comic yet?

Sounds like cloud computing to me

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, Humor

This just in from Gareth:

The schedule of weekend talks for SCALE 8X has been finalized and are posted on the SCALE web site at http://www.socallinuxexpo.org. The topics are interesting and wide-ranging – check them out! The schedule for the Friday specialty sessions (OSSIE, WIOS and the Try-It Lab) will be posted in the next week.

Looks like I have the Sunday morning keynote.