My buddy Reid Serozi has dreamed up an amuzing alternative universe where high-speed rail replaces the Pullen Park choo-choo. That Matt Furner character hits close to home, too.

There is confidence that compromises between city planning and local park goers can be worked out in the years to come, and the hope is to have high-speed rail running around Pullen park by 3080.

Matt Furner, the city’s parks board chairman and a community organizer in East Raleigh wasn’t available for comment due to his "open source email solution" being accidentally blacklisted, but rumors suggest the high speed rail idea originated after a Furner Family visit to Disney Land.

via Reid Serozi – Open Raleigh: High Speed Rail at Pullen Park.

Tonight was a milestone of sorts as the Raleigh CAC meeting I chaired actually ended ahead of schedule. In the four years I’ve been on the board I can’t recall a single night where this has happened.

When I was elected chair, I pledged to my fellow boardmembers that I would run an efficient meeting and not waste everyone’s time. While the first few meetings were a bit longer than I would’ve liked, tonight we actually ended a minute or two early.

One of my first big moves was to make the meetings end at 8:30 PM instead of 9 PM. I thought we should be able to get done what we need to get done in that time and so far it’s worked out well. So with the switch to the earlier time, it’s probably safe to say that no RCAC meeting has ever ended before 8:30 until tonight.

One of the reasons I consider this a milestone is that I conducted the meeting fairly, sought input from the CAC chairs, and moved things along when they needed moving. Another notable thing is that the CAC chairs actually listened to me! When I first joined the RCAC board years ago, the RCAC seemed like the epitome of herding cats. Being chair looked like a thankless job that I accepted only with trepidation. Instead, meetings like tonight show that I may be able to effectively lead this organization after all.

I came home feeling psyched, energized, and actually looking forward to the next meeting. It’s a pretty good place to be!

I was quoted in this morning’s Midtown Raleigh News on the new Public Participation Process for Raleigh Parks.

After a string of park projects beset by opposition battles and lengthy delays, the city’s parks and rec department will soon overhaul the way it works with the public during planning for future parks, ballfields and gyms.

The proposed guidelines, laid out in exhaustive detail in three documents totaling 89 pages, are intended to pinpoint areas of disagreement and bring together citizens groups to give suggestions, particularly when controversial projects are involved.

The idea is to resolve disputes early and not let them fester, said City Manager Russell Allen.

“The hope is that if you take time up front, you don’t get snagged later in the development of the project and run into an element of the public that never bought in,” Allen said.

via Raleigh to involve public sooner in parks planning – Raleigh – MidtownRaleighNews.com.

As I picked up my dry cleaning yesterday, a man smelling of alcohol wandered into the store and leaned forward to me.

“Hey man,” he said as he extended his fist for a fist bump, “you vote?”

“Beg your pardon. Am I broke?”

“No,” he mumbled, trying to focus his eyes on me. “Do you vote?”

“Yes, I do,” I said.

He nodded. “Well, I vote, too!”

“Is that right?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “and I got it all figured out.”

“Really?” I smiled, amused. ” Okay, sir, tell me what you got!”

“You see, I hear what each candidate has to say, ” he said as he swayed. “I see where everything balances out, you see?”

He put his hands out by his side like they were two sides of a balance. “And I see who’s gonna win and then I vote for them!”

Before I was able to thank him for this advice, he wandered out into the parking lot and down the street.

I think there are lot of people that vote like this guy does.

I was disappointed that a majority of North Carolinian voters voted to enshrine discrimination to the state constitution Tuesday. Many pointed to the Bible as their justification.

The way I see it, God gave some people blue eyes and some people brown eyes. God made some people black, some white, some Asian, and so on. Likewise, God made some people straight and some people gay. It is not for us to question God’s wisdom! I’ve always wondered how some can claim to know God better than God Himself. Let he who is without sin …

It isn’t right for amendment opponents to call those who supported this amendment misguided, or uninformed, or hateful. Only when these folks see that gays are people, too – people who simply want to love whom they want on equal terms with everyone else – will attitudes change.

I’ve only been on this planet for 43 years but it seems to me that one thing this world could use is more love.

I have to say I’m totally flabbergasted by the North Carolina Democratic Party’s SEC vote to reject David Parker’s resignation. It’s a total farce.

As my friend Perry pointed out, never before has the party held a vote to reject a resignation. On the face of it it seems to me that the motion would be out of order.

I am concerned that Parker appears not to be keeping his word to step down. I’m also concerned that the vote of 269-203 show a deep division in the party. How could anyone in the party choose to support such a divisive leader (and I use that term loosely)?

As time passes, my thoughts on Parker’s trainwreck of a press conference have only been reinforced. As I said before, I have no idea whether or not sexual harassment took place. What I do know is that Parker’s explanation was so much bullshit. At best, he’s an aloof leader who failed to properly vet and supervise his employees. At worst he’s a baldfaced liar, a loose cannon who perhaps even protected a sexual predator. Neither option evokes confidence.

And for the Parker supporters to claim that others are attacking him is ridiculous. He’s the boss of the party; the buck stops with him. He’s the captain of the ship and with that authority comes responsibility. If the ship wrecks, it doesn’t matter whether he was paying attention or not, it’s his fault, period. There is no one else to blame.

Here’s where Ursula and I will be over the summer. If you happen to be attending any of the following cons, stop by and say hello!

• May 25-27 : ConQuest, Kansas City MO
• Jun 15-17 : AnthroCon, Pittsburgh PA
• Aug 24-26 : BuboniCon, Albuquerque NM
• Aug 31-Sep 3 : WorldCon, Chicago IL

And in there somewhere we’re going to Minneapolis MN for a wedding, and I’ll be visiting Bellevue WA a few more times. I’m going to try to drag Urs along to WA at least once more this year, so we can hang out with friends and she can go bird watching with the ever-awesome Tina.

As a Wolfpack fan and an alum of N.C. State, it might be easy for me to gloat about the academic scandal taking place with UNC’s football and basketball players. The vaunted “Carolina Way” that Carolina people love to preach has turned out to be amusingly hollow. It seems that academic performance takes a back seat to winning. It would be amusing under most circumstances.

Then I hear what N.C. Athletic Director Debbie Yow says about the Wolfpack teams and it makes me wonder: what’s to stop the Wolfpack from falling into the same trap? I don’t question Yow’s dedication to N.C. State at all but there’s more to winning than the win and loss counts. Is Yow equally dedicated to academic performance? If it came down to winning or looking the other way when academic shenanigans take place, what would Yow do?

The kind of money being thrown around in college sports is in doubt corrupting. I can only hope my school is strong enough to resist the urge to cut corners.

My meeting General Shelton got me researching some flag officers I’ve known. On the way I happened to land on the Wikipedia article about the 1989 turret explosion aboard the USS Iowa. The article is one of the best I’ve read on Wikipedia. It’s as riveting as a novel. The book about the incident, A Glimpse of Hell: The Explosion on the USS Iowa and Its Cover Up, is equally compelling, as this excerpt shows.

I was in the Navy at the time and I remember well this incident and the subsequent whitewash. It was a lesson to me that the term “military justice” will always be an oxymoron.

The USS Iowa turret explosion occurred in the Number Two 16-inch gun turret of the United States Navy battleship USS Iowa (BB-61) on April 19, 1989. The explosion in the center gun room killed 47 of the turret’s crewmen and severely damaged the gun turret itself. Two major investigations were undertaken, one by the Navy and then one by the General Accounting Office (GAO) and Sandia National Laboratories. The investigations produced conflicting conclusions.

via USS Iowa turret explosion – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Once again, it’s time for a weekend of frivolity and technology that we call “CarolinaCon”. While I was sure that doing so would put me on some secret list of persons-to-watch, I made plans to attend.

As usual, the Con spanned the weekend, from Friday evening until Sunday evening. Here’s my impressions.

FRIDAY EVENING

• 7:00pm – Identifying Cyber Warriors (Tom Holt / Professor Farnsworth)
  The professor always does such a good job of easing the crowd out of reality and into the “Con-zone”. His presentations are academic, but touch on hacker culture. This year, he gave questionnaires to college students to determine correlations between their attitudes on protesting and hactivism across two dimensions: domestic-vs-foreign and physical-vs-virtual.
• 8:00pm – Bypassing Android Permissions (Georgia Weidman)
  Georgia explained how Android phone apps implement “intents” or services, and then how to inspect an Android app to see its contents. Using these two pieces, she was able to write unprivileged apps that use another app’s higher-priviledge services.
• 9:00pm – Intro to Hacking Bluetooth (ronin)
  Ronin has assembled a wide array of open source Bluetooth tools into a Linux distribution that he calls “Blubuntu”. He showed the basic usage of some of these tools, with some good background info on how the protocols work. A good overview talk!
• 10:00pm – F-ing the Friendly Skies (Deviant Ollam)
  The original plan was to end the Friday night session with a round of Hacker Trivia, but the schedule was abruptly changed to include this entertaining talk from Deviant Ollam, whose talks usually center on lock picking and air travel (and they usually include alcohol). This year’s presentation did not disappoint — the topic was the “Mile High Club”, with a complete survey of logistics, opportunity, and suggestions for flight timings and choice of aircraft.

SATURDAY

• 10:00am – DevHack: Pre-Product Exploitation (Snide)
  Once they cranked up the volume on Snide’s mic, he walked us through several ideas for planting malware into a software development environment, implanting your payload at the source.
• 11:00am – Malware Retooled (Big-O)
  This talk discussed how we can watch what malware DOES rather than trying to match against signatures. Big-O showed some nice visualization tools, like thread graphs.
• lunch break
• 1:00pm – Inside Jobs: Stealing Sensitive Data and Intellectual Property (Vic Vandal and emwav)
  Vic and emwav enumerated several ways that companies and employees can escalate the arms race… employees can steal proprietary information, and employers can make it difficult. The bottom line for me was that this arms race is stacked in favor of the attacker.
• 2:00pm – Project Byzantium: Improvisable Ad-Hoc Wireless Mesh Networking for Disaster Zones (Sitwon The Pirate and The Doctor)
  Apparently, someone told this group that CarolinaCon was a costume party. The pirate and the doctor win the prize for best costumes. But pay closer attention. These guys are smart — they have scoured the internet for cool mesh networking tools, and they have packaged them into a LiveCD distro called “Byzantium”. Imagine a disaster or political unrest scenario, where you would like to mesh together a group of users and share an internet connection. Keep an eye on this fledgling project.
• 3:00pm – Hacking as an Act of War (G. Mark Hardy)
  Gmark has been keeping his eye on the geopolitical landscape and how different nations approach info security. He has insights into the capabilities and motivations of the different players, and he observes recent cyber-attacks that have shaped the new balance of powers. Where do we draw the line between hacking and warfare?
• 4:00pm – Big Bang Theory: The Evolution of Pentesting High Security Environments (Joe McCray)
  Joe warns corporate America that we should stop focusing on the vulnerabilities, stop patting ourselves on the back when we’ve checked all of the patch check boxes, and instead focus on why an attacker would be interested in their companies to begin with, and prioritize based on the value of the assets (illustrated with a colorful analogy about driving through the ‘hood).
• Dinner Break
• 7:00pm – Spyometrics: New World of Biometric Surveillance (Dr. Noah Schiffman, aka Lo-Res)
  This talk had a lot of promise, because the subject matter is wide open for thought-provoking stories. But I felt like this talk left more loose ends than tied-up ones.
• 8:00pm – Dr. Tran goes to Switzerland (Dr. Tran)
  One of the best talks of the show, and it was not even about security! Dr Tran recently moved to Zurich, and he recorded his impressions and shared them with the Con attendees.
• 9:00pm – Hacker Trivia
  Much like hacker trivia in previous years, but I noticed three differences. The game was more lightly attended than at previous cons. Many of the questions went unanswered (meaning Vic had to take a drink). And most disappointing, Al did not emcee.

SUNDAY

• 10:00am – Attacking CAPTCHAs (Gursev Singh Kalra)
  This talk was canceled. Instead, we heard from some UNC-Charlotte students on the accomplishments of their hacking competition team.
• 11:00am – Patch to Pwned: Exploiting Firmware Patching to Compromise MFP Devices (Deral Heiland)
  Deral Heiland has made a career out of keeping printer manufacturers on their toes. This time, he decomposes a firmware update package for Xerox printers, and he creates his own update that includes his “modifications”.
• Lunch Break
• 1:00pm – Hacking your Mind and Emotions (Branson Matheson)
  Branson shows how easily we can be socially engineered. It happens every day, from advertisers, authority figures and administrators. He shows us how to recognize when we’re being manipulated, and he encourages us to know our rights and responsibilities so we can limit our exposure.
• 2:00pm – It’s 2012 and My Network Got Hacked (Omar Santos)
  Case studies of real-life compromises, in spite of the sophisticated defenses employed. Omar discussed the challenges that are encountered by large organizations with wide networks and hundreds of assets to manage.
• 3:00pm – Declarative Web Security: DEP for the Web (Steve Pinkham)
  Modern browsers are starting to include advanced policy engines that allow web sites to declare rules, such as “only run javascript from this host”, in an attempt to restrict what potential malware can do.
• 4:00pm – Raspberry Pi’s Impact on Hacking (DJ Palombo)
  OK, the RaspPi is a cheap small computer. We get that. DJ Palombo seems to think that the revolutionary concept is that its low profile and disposability make it a good “bug” or or hidden node for hacking.

Thanks to the organizers and presenters for another memorable Con!

Slashdot has a post on gamification in the workplace today.

One of the myriad replies was from a poster, gomoX, who was pushing his company’s gamified tech support tool (invgate.com/en/service-desk/gamification). I’m all for product placement and pushing when it’s relevant (and here it most certainly was), but I don’t like the general concepts in that particular tool.

gomoX started well, too:

Bad system:
* 10 points for solving a ticket
* 1 point por replying to a ticket
* 4 points for chipping into another tech’s tickets (allegedly to help out)
* -20 points for reopened ticket
* -100 points for SLA missed

but then goes into describing (and then having shredded by many responders) their “Good system”:

* 1 point for solving a ticket
* 15, 10, 0, -10, -20 points for 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1-star customer ratings on those tickets
* -100 points for SLA missed
* 200 points bonus for doing 10 5-star tickets in a row
* 1000 points bonus for doing those 10 5-star tickets in a row in less than one hour

It even starts to become fun! And if you plug gamification throughout the whole system, even this (taken from a “Knowledge Week” quest that lasted through a specific week in an InvGate Service Desk instance):
* 10 points for creating a Knowledge Base article
* 15, 10, 0, -10, -20 points for 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1-star customer ratings on those articles
* 20 points for having the article you created used by other techs to solve a ticket
* 50 points for having the article you created used by customers to figure out the ticket themselves

I’ve written in the past about support organizations, and have a guide on effective support cases available, too. And I stand by my previous assertions that “gaming” and the metrics mindset are a Bad Thing™ – when they’re the BASIS of management reviews, promotions, etc.

The big problem with the InvGate concept is stated so cheerfully, I had to read it twice:

You get a performance metric in the amount of points an agent gathered during a period of X … It even has a “ka-ching” sound effect when you get points!

Seriously? a ‘”ka-ching” sound effect’? Who does this encourage? Certainly not any of the professionals I’ve ever worked with!

Maybe there are groups for which this would work – but none that I would want to deal with over anything important or business critical.

There are ways in which gentle, informal “competition” can be a Good Thing™ … but those are few and far between in the professional environment of support work.

---

^{_{A friend of mine pointed me at a [potentially] NSFW site with “badges” you can earn that was pretty funny (excluding the cussing).}}

While watching my pooch sniff his way around the neighborhood this week, I pondered how he always seemed to know when a storm is coming – often much sooner than we do. Is it the vibration of the thunder? The sound of thunder? Could it be that he is more sensitive to the electrical charges, being that he wears more fur than we do?

Then I remembered the NOVA program on dogs and how a dog’s senses are inferior or equal to humans in all aspects except one: the sense of smell. A dog’s sense of smell is its meal ticket and is a bazillion times more powerful than a human’s. What if a dog can smell an approaching storm? Of course, rain has a distinctive smell and definitely changes the way the environment smells.

But what if it went further than that? What if dogs can smell lightning? Lightning and other high-energy electric discharges ionize air, creating ozone. What if dogs can smell this ozone?

And … if my dog is at his most compliant in the midst of a storm (or the threat of a storm), could a small ozone generator attached to his collar make him safely and painlessly stop in his tracks should he decide to escape on an unauthorized jaunt through the neighborhood?

Tonight Kelly’s employer, Leadership North Carolina (LNC), held a graduation and awards ceremony for its 19th class at the State Capitol building. I rarely get to attend the LNC events as I’m either stuck working or parenting while she’s gone. Kelly needed a photographer for tonight’s ceremony, though, so I got to tag along.

LNC presented a leadership award to General Henry Hugh Shelton, USA (ret.) and (after my photography chores were done) I got to have my picture taken with him.

Dave Winer had an interesting take on the recent Twitter-NYPD flare-up.

Personally, the thought of any government organization demanding records without a warrant is abhorrent.

However, since the entire point of Twitter is to make your tweets public … then what is there to subpoena? They’re all out there – visible to the world… Unless the user has deleted them (and, from my understanding, they are “real” deletes (unlike facebook “deletes” which may or may not go anywhere)).

So, NYPD – why are you not just looking at the tweets that are available publicly? Why are you trying to demand data that may or may not exist, and without a warrant?

Lastly, to Mr Winer’s comment that “the government has no business investing taxpayer dollars in private companies”: there’s a couple big problems therein. First, since it was in reference to the Library of Congress, we should make sure that in addition to not “investing” in archiving tweets, they also not invest in archiving books, journals, newspapers, etc – after all, those are also coming from “private companies”. Second, if the government shouldn’t be investing taxpayer dollars in private companies, then where, exactly, do you propose the “government” get what it needs to operate? By fiat? By dictatorial claim? No – those aren’t good public relations moves. The government needs to obtain the services and goods it needs to continue its functions from private industry (or we need to abandon this whole ‘capitalism’ thing and go for a pure central economy wherein all produced goods and services are provided by the government).

Bernie Sanders is spot on. The American middle class won’t take kindly to shouldering the lion’s share of the economic recovery while the ultra rich get richer.

The backlash has already hit Europe. I would not want to be an incumbent when it hits America.

Sen. Sanders has it nailed. The American people don’t like extremism. Since the 2010 elections, Republicans have been pushing fiscal extremism, and the bill is about to come due in 2012. The Republican Party is out of step with what most Americans really want. They want their Social Security and Medicare left the way they are. They want taxes to be raised at least a little bit on those who can afford it the most, and they want the social safety net to be strong and left in place.

via Bernie Sanders Warns Republicans that Sarkozy’s Fate Will Soon Be Theirs.

I just read the autobiography Bill Graham Presents: My Life Inside Rock And Out and I have to say that Graham led one spectacular life. I was interested in learning about how concert promotion is done, but Graham’s life went far beyond that.

Graham was a Holocaust survivor who was spirited out of Germany to France and then to America. Graham spent time as a youth in an upstate New York orphanage, where he became dejected after repeatedly being passed over for adoption. Some say that drove his need to feel loved, which he worked to do every day of his life. He always gave the extra effort, which made the musicians he worked with very happy but often annoyed the musicians’ managers, who paid for Graham’s largesse.

Graham had an extraordinarily keen business sense, which showed itself early in his life. When he signed up for Army duty in the Korean war, he put this ability to use by selling food from his troop transport ship’s galley to other hungry soldiers. He also ran gambling on the ship. Any time he saw a need, he was angling for a way to fill it and make a profit.

Graham also spent time working in the resorts in the Catskills mountains. He worked as a waiter during the day and ran the gambling games at night. The gambling income gave him a taste of the good life.

Graham wanted to be an actor and worked a few plays but never got far with it. It was through his acting work that he got a taste for concert promotion. The acting troupe he was with, the Mime Troupe, needed to raise money and Graham organized a concert benefit. He soon left acting behind to concentrate solely on promoting concerts. The rest is history.

When I first got this book, I joked that it would be an education in sex, drugs, and rock and roll. While there was plenty of rock and roll, there was very little sex and drugs. Graham didn’t care for drugs and always considered himself a pretty square guy. While I’m sure he had groupies, his book doesn’t go into much detail about this. Graham frequently was seen by musicians who knew him as a “New York businessman:” very straight.

The book is over 600 pages of quotes from Bill, his siblings, business associates, musicians, and others. The voice changes constantly which makes it sometimes tricky to remember who is doing the talking. I liked that the co-author, Robert Greenfield, often balanced Graham’s bragging about an incident with a counter-view from another participant. In this way, the book isn’t so much autobiographical as it is semi-autobiographical. One gets a clearer picture of Graham through these multiple viewpoints.

A few of the later chapters are devoted to the tours and the bands Graham helped promote. The Grateful Dead were one of his first, as were Jefferson Airplane; Santana; Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young and others. Pete Townsend of The Who had great things to say about Graham, as did Eric Clapton. The Rolling Stones took some time to warm to Graham but did three tours with him (the fourth, 1989′s Steel Wheels tour, was done by a rival – which broke Graham’s heart).

The biggest surprise for me was the chapter on Led Zeppelin. Like many kids who grew up on classic rock, I’ve always been a fan of Zep. Graham’s book changed my mind about this band with his account of the incident involving band manager Peter Grant in Oakland as part of the band’s 1977 tour. Grant’s bratty son was caught swiping plaques from trailers backstage by one of Graham’s security guys, Jim Matzorkis. Grant became incensed at this and he and his security goons beat the living daylights out of Matzorkis. Graham’s team wanted to even the score but had to settle for misdemeanor assault charges and a follow-up lawsuit. Graham was never satisfied with the outcome and blames Grant for the evil aura which enveloped the band during that time.

Graham went on to promote Live Aid, Amnesty International, and other huge concerts. He died in a helicopter crash in 1991 at the age of 60.

There are a lot of colorful anecdotes in the book: Graham obviously loved to tell a story. It is, however, a bit short of the nuts and bolts of concert promotion. A huge part of Bill Graham’s success was his personality. There are plenty of ways to succeed in concert promotion but it will never be done again the way Bill Graham did it.

After our fun Sunday spent at the N.C. State baseball game and today’s column by Caldon Tudor about the rising popularity of baseball, I got to thinking of big things. Like, major league things.

Raleigh can’t have its own minor league team, but what if it had its own major league team? What if Raleigh wooed the Tampa Bay Rays here and built a gorgeous baseball stadium overlooking downtown? Wouldn’t that be great?

Update 7:50 PM: Looks like I’m not the only one to think this was a good idea. From this site (date of posting unknown but Google Cache snapped it five days ago):

Is it true the Tampa Bay Rays are moving to Raleigh, NC?

by Baseball Fan
in Tampa Bay Rays

I heard they are moving because of terrible attendance to Raleigh. Also, their farm team is in Durham. The Raleigh Technicians?

Finally heeding the warnings that my version of Ubuntu was out of date, I upgraded my Thinkpad T42 laptop to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Bad move. It seems the ATI Radeon Mobility 7500 video adapter which has been supported for many years is now no longer supported. My laptop is now infuriatingly slow and there’s apparently no cure except to reinstall an older, less-douchey version of Ubuntu.

Between this and Ubuntu’s dumping of the Gnome desktop I’ve about had enough of Ubuntu’s boneheaded design decisions. Looks like I’ll be taking a look at the latest Fedora. At least it’s a hometown Linux company (i.e. Red Hat).

I just finished a week in Montreal. This was my first time in Québec, and while the weather could have been better, I really enjoyed the trip.

Québec is like France but with subtitles.

The primary language is French, but many signs are also in English. The rule seems to be that the English translation has to be below, and in a point size no larger than 50%, of the original French. Hence, subtitles.

I stayed downtown and took the Metro out to the customer site. They are a managed service provider with a goal to manage more than 50,000 access points across the country. They had been using OpenNMS for awhile, so it was a lot of fun for me since I got to help solve interesting problems, but it was also a lot of work because I got to help solve interesting problems. They worked my brain pretty hard to come up with a way for OpenNMS to address their needs, not just from a functionality standpoint but to come up with solutions that could also be automated and scaled. It was amazing how flexible OpenNMS can be, and with one exception we were able to address everything without changing the code.

I can honestly say that they would not have been able to do this with any other product out there. Not only are other solutions too rigid, their cost struction (i.e. per node pricing) would make them prohibitive on cost alone. Score one for open source.

It wasn’t all work. I did get to sample some fine cuisine (Montréal has a large number of nice restaurants) as well as local favorites such as “steamies” (hot dogs) and poutin (fried, fresh cut potatoes covered in a gravy sauce and cheese curds).

We also went out to see a midnight showing of “The Avengers” (review: very good, but unless you are a huge comic fan, maybe not as great as some of the reviews suggest – and stay until the very end of the credits) so I”m beat.

Plus I only had 30 hours at home before heading to Germany for the OpenNMS Users Conference Europe.

(sigh)

I’m sitting at DFW as I write this, on my way to FRA. The trip started out poorly since I forgot both my jacket and my headphones (which usually live in my case but were in my jacket since I’d only been home for a short while and, hey, I’d obviously remember to get it on the way out) but I did manage to find an inexpensive jacket at the airport (thank goodness for the changing seasons).

But things started to get better as I managed an upgrade on the first flight, and as I walked into the Admiral’s Club I almost bumped into Snoop Dogg, who was heading out. I’m glad I didn’t as the enormous bodyguard with him would have crushed me like a piece of paper.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in Fulda, and I’ll try to keep the blog updated throughout the week. Remember that we are bringing the goodness that is the OpenNMS Users Conference to the US this year. Hope to see you there.

In 2005, after a particularly bad patch, I lost my shit. I had just been laid off from my high-pressure job, my marriage was falling apart[1], and I found myself weeping in a parking lot waiting for my oldest’s bus to arrive.

Not pretty, right? Clinical depression brought on by stress and burnout. It took me another year to figure out that I had burned out, and probably two to get close to fully recovered. It was not easy, nor was it pretty at times. Meds helped, and so did the divorce, and some counseling, and the support of friends.

So when I took stock this last month, and saw what I now know are the early warning signs of burnout and depression, I did, as they say, the needful. Talked to Ursula to see what she thinks. Talked to my doctor about getting back on the meds[2]. Talked to my new manager[3] on how we can start to mitigate things and keep me from going back over the deep end.

So we’ll see how it goes. At least this time I know the signs, I know what I need to do, and I know how to get better[4]. And if things go a little pear-shaped, I also have a supportive environment to keep me from losing it completely.

This time.

[1] It would be two years for us to figure out it was not something that could be salvaged
[2] Hello Zoloft! It helped a LOT last time, and I’m not scared of it now.
[3] I’ve been without one for about 6 months, and man, is it nice to have one again.
[4] I hope.

I’ve been considering all of the cool little projects that are going on in Raleigh: Artsplosure, Hopscotch, CityCamp, SparkCon, First Friday, Kirby Derby, the Benelux Cafe Cycling Club, TriangleWiki, 1304 Bikes, Music on the Porch, Little Raleigh Radio, Oak City Cycling Project, greenways, a future whitewater park, a skate park, and many, many others. Each of these is a decent project on its own. Each creates its own little ripple. In Raleigh right now, these little ripples are coming together with other ripples to create little waves. Those little waves will combine with other little waves to make big waves, and soon those big waves will come together to create one gigantic wave that can’t be ignored.

Few might be paying attention now, but the waves are building that will soon wash over Raleigh in a tidal wave of cool.

Hot on the heels of two other breweries moving into the North Carolina mountains, Colorado-based Oskar Blues announced that it will be building a brewery in Brevard, NC:

In a statement released late Tuesday, founder Dale Katechis, a mountain biking enthusiast, said he has kept a bike in Brevard, on the edge of the Pisgah National Forest, for years, and travels there frequently to go mountain biking and to attend the annual Mountain Song Music Festival.

“This place rings true with the same eclectic mountain charm that inspired Oskar Blues to put Dale’s Pale Ale in a can back in the day in Lyons,” Katechis said in a statement announcing his plans.

I’d never heard of Oskar Blues’s beers until Kelly and I enjoyed a pint of Gordon (now G’Knight) in Fredericksburg’s Capital Ale House. I remember that it tasted amazing. That beer will forever hold a special place in my heart.

Welcome to North Carolina, Oskar Blues! I hope to visit your brewery when it opens!

Here’s this morning’s statement from Adam Yauch’s publicist, Nasty Little Man PR.

It is with great sadness that we confirm that musician, rapper, activist and director Adam “MCA” Yauch, founding member of Beastie Boys and also of the Milarepa Foundation that produced the Tibetan Freedom Concert benefits, and film production and distribution company Oscilloscope Laboratories, passed away in his native New York City this morning after a near-three-year battle with cancer. He was 47 years old.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, Yauch taught himself to play bass in high school, forming a band for his 17th birthday party that would later become known the world over as Beastie Boys.

With fellow members Michael “Mike D” Diamond and Adam “Adrock” Horovitz, Beastie Boys would go on to sell over 40 million records, release four #1 albums–including the first hip hop album ever to top the Billboard 200, the band’s 1986 debut full length, Licensed To Ill–win three Grammys, and the MTV Video Vanguard Lifetime Achievement award. Last month Beastie Boys were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, with Diamond and Horovitz reading an acceptance speech on behalf of Yauch, who was unable to attend.

In addition to his hand in creating such historic Beastie Boys albums as Paul’s Boutique, Check Your Head, Ill Communication, Hello Nasty and more, Yauch was a founder of the Milarepa Fund, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting awareness and activism regarding the injustices perpetrated on native Tibetans by Chinese occupational government and military forces. In 1996, Milarepa produced the first Tibetan Freedom Concert in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, which was attended by 100,000 people, making it the biggest benefit concert on U.S. soil since 1985’s Live Aid. The Tibetan Freedom Concert series would continue to stage some of the most significant benefit shows in the world for nearly a decade following in New York City, Washington DC, Tokyo, Sydney, Amsterdam, Taipei and other cities.

In the wake of September 11, 2001, Milarepa organized New Yorkers Against Violence, a benefit headlined by Beastie Boys at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom, with net proceeds disbursed to the New York Women’s Foundation Disaster Relief Fund and the New York Association for New Americans (NYANA) September 11th Fund for New Americans–each chosen for their efforts on behalf of 9/11 victims least likely to receive help from other sources.

Under the alias of Nathanial Hörnblowér, Yauch directed iconic Beastie Boys videos including ”So Whatcha Want,” ”Intergalactic,” “Body Movin” and “Ch-Check It Out.” Under his own name, Yauch directed last year’s Fight For Your Right Revisited, an extended video for “Make Some Noise” from Beastie Boys’ Hot Sauce Committee Part Two, starring Elijah Wood, Danny McBride and Seth Rogen as the 1986 Beastie Boys, making their way through a half hour of cameo-studded misadventures before squaring off against Jack Black, Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly as Beastie Boys of the future.

Yauch’s passion and talent for filmmaking led to his founding of Oscilloscope Laboratories, which in 2008 released his directorial film debut, the basketball documentary Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot and has since become a major force in independent video distribution, amassing a catalogue of such acclaimed titles as Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, Oren Moverman’s The Messenger, Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop, Lance Bangs and Spike Jonze’s Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait Of Maurice Sendak, and many more.

Yauch is survived by his wife Dechen and his daughter Tenzin Losel, as well as his parents Frances and Noel Yauch.

Here’s Beastie Boys member Adam “MCA” Yauch’s YouTube announcement in 2009 that he had cancer. Sad that he passed away today.

RIP Adam “MCA” Yauch. What a shame.

The music world is mourning again. Adam Yauch, known as Beastie Boys rapper MCA, has died.

GlobalGrind.com, Russell Simmon’s website, reports that Yauch died after a long battle with cancer. He was 47.

via Beastie Boys’ Adam Yauch dies at age 47.

Yesterday there was yet another massive traffic jam on I-40 in RTP. Commutes that usually take 30 minutes took three times as long. I was fortunate that it was a day that I work from home, but thousands of others weren’t so lucky. I don’t know anything that could have better validated my earlier thoughts on RTP being doomed.

Today’s N&O editorial echoed my earlier thoughts, though I found a contradiction. The N&O says RTP seeks to urbanize, yet it’s still touting its “large amounts of green space.” You can’t have it both ways! You can’t have density and not have density. Right now RTP has little to no density and the odds of it achieving any are slim to none.

In short, RTP is a losing model. RTP may die a slow death, but it will die. After sixty years of service, it’s time for RTP to retire.

The park’s model has become an American classic – large, woodsy, campus-like settings where companies and agencies have plenty of elbow room. Its founders took advantage of the synergy derived from the surrounding constellation of major universities.

Chemicals, computers, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, environmental sciences – these have been the park’s backbone, and its prosperity has driven growth throughout the Triangle, especially in North Raleigh, Cary and southern Durham.

But if companies like IBM, Nortel and Glaxo were the anchors, the park has had to adjust as those companies have evolved or (as in Nortel’s case) faded from the scene in the face of new technologies. And what used to be an attractive sense of isolation from hectic commercial corridors has become, in some people’s minds, more detriment than advantage.

via RTP reset – Editorials – NewsObserver.com.

Joseph Ness’s recent series on profits in supposedly non-profit hospitals in the News and Observer is some great reporting. I was glad to see my neighborhood hospital, WakeMed, was holding its costs down, comparatively speaking.

On my morning walk the other day, I was still steaming about my last doctor’s visit, where my doctor basically sleepwalked through our appointment. Why does it take a medical degree to write a prescription to whatever high-priced drug-du-jour the pharmaceutical companies are pushing? Where’s the curiosity into what might really be going on? If I’m going to pay $150 to see my doctor for all of 15 minutes, what does it take to get his full attention during that time?

What is there was a marketplace that did for healthcare what Priceline.com and Hotwire did for travel costs, a reverse auction? What if you as a patient could anonymously list whatever maladies you have (or think you have) and doctors could bid on treating you? The best doctors would be be rewarded not only with business but with “site karma,” (i.e., their reputation) so that others on the site would be more willing to work with them.

I’ve long said that telemedicine will one day shake up America’s broken healthcare industry. A site bringing patients and doctors together could be a good first step to harnessing the medical abilities of doctors not just in this country but of doctors from around the world.

(Yes, I know I’m a big fan of the reverse auction idea, having recently suggested it whimsically for citizenship).

Here’s a great pic by Sam Bennett of the Benelux Cafe Cycling Club shortly after they rode through my neighborhood Tuesday evening. Bike clubs like this are just one of the many, many reasons I love Raleigh!

View Larger Map

Futzing around with Google Maps this morning, I noticed that the Mount Weather doomsday facility hadn’t been reviewed yet using Google Places. So I had a little fun writing a review:

I sheltered here during the Armageddon and would never do it again! The cots were way too hard, the rations were somewhat tasteless, my room had NO windows, and it was next to impossible to get the generals’ attention when the sheets and towels needed changing. What you see in the brochure doesn’t match the actual experience. Take my advice: the next time the world ends, steer clear of Mount Weather! Go with a Hampton Inn or similar chain. You’ll be glad you did!

Yesterday I discovered that at least one of Earthlink’s mail servers has been listed on a spam blackhole list, meaning mail sent through that server disappears from the Internet.

I searched in vain on Earthlink’s support page for an email address to a clueful engineer. Instead, I made do with a “live chat” with someone named “Rocky.” Rocky dutifully followed his script but instead of hearing me when I told him that Earthlink’s servers were blacklisted, Rocky had me recheck my email settings.

It’s sad when I know more than the support person who supposedly is there to help me.

Please hold for the next available agent. Your chat should begin in approximately 0 minutes. You may type your question while you wait, but you won’t be able to SEND it until your chat is assigned to an agent.

‘Rocky S’ says: Thank you for contacting EarthLink LiveChat, how may I help you today?

Rocky S: Hello, how may I assist you today?

CUSTOMER@earthlink.net: I just got a bounced email which indicates an Earthlink mail server is on a blackhole list.

Rocky S: Please stay on hold for three minutes, while I go through the issue.

CUSTOMER@earthlink.net: 550 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [209.86.89.69] blocked using Trend Micro RBL+.

CUSTOMER@earthlink.net: Were you aware of this?

Rocky S: Thank you for being on hold.

Rocky S: I am sorry to hear that. I’ll do my best to resolve this issue.

Rocky S: You received this bounce back message when you try to send an email to a particular email address from your EarthLink account. Am I correct?

CUSTOMER@earthlink.net: correct

Rocky S: Thank you for the confirmation.

Rocky S: May I know the email address to which you are trying to send email and getting bounce back message?

CUSTOMER@earthlink.net: RECIPIENT@domain.xyz

Rocky S: Thank you for the information.

CUSTOMER@earthlink.net: This looks relevant:

CUSTOMER@earthlink.net: http://www.mail-abuse.com/cgi-bin/show_listing.cgi?5175352

Rocky S: Can you paste the complete bounce back message you have received?

CUSTOMER@earthlink.net: Here are the relevant bits:

CUSTOMER@earthlink.net: [pasted in email headers]

Rocky S: Sure, go ahead.

Rocky S: Thank you for providing necessary information.

Rocky S: Please give me quick two minutes.

Rocky S: I am sorry, this is taking more time than usual. Can I have a five more minutes?

CUSTOMER@earthlink.net: sure

Rocky S: Is the above provided bounce back message you receive when you send email to RECIPIENT@domain.xyz email address from your EarthLink account?

CUSTOMER@earthlink.net: correct

Rocky S: Thank you for the confirmation.

Rocky S: Which email program are you using to send and receive email messages? Is it the EarthLink TotalAccess Mailbox, Microsoft Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Windows Live Mail or Microsoft Outlook? Or is it EarthLink Web Mail?

CUSTOMER@earthlink.net: Mozilla Thunderbird

Rocky S: Thank you for the information.

Rocky S: Thank you for being on hold.

Rocky S: Let us check the email server settings in Thunderbird email program.

Rocky S: Please follow the below steps to check the settings for Thunderbird.

Rocky S:
1. Open Thunderbird.
2. Click on tools.
3. Select Account settings.
4. Select Server settings.
5. The Server type should be Pop mail server.
6. Server name should be pop.earthlink.net
7.Port number should be 110
8.The username should be your complete email address (Eg: CUSTOMER@earthlink.net)
9.Connection Security should be Set to None.
10.Authentication Method shoule be set to Password Transmitted insecurely.
11. Select Outgoing server (Smtp)
12. Select Earthlink SMTP and click on Edit.
13. Enter Description has Earthlink or any other name.
14. Server name should be smtpauth.earthlink.net
15. Port number should be 587
16. Connection Security should be Set to None.
17. Authentication Method shoule be set to Password Transmitted insecurely
18. Username should be your complete email address (Eg: CUSTOMER@earthlink.net)
19. Click Ok.
20. Click OK.

Rocky S: Please keep me posted once you are done with the above steps.

Rocky S: It has been a while since I’ve received a message from you. Are you still with me?

Rocky S: I’m afraid we are losing connection. Please respond.

Rocky S: It appears that you have been away from your computer for an extended time or that your questions have already been answered. To assist another customer that has been waiting, I needed to close our chat conversation. I apologize for any inconvenience. If you have another question or two, please contact us again. EarthLink’s LiveChat Technical Support Department can be reached from the Support By Chat link at http://support.earthlink.net . Thank you for using EarthLink LiveChat.

Chat session has been ended by the agent. Please click the “Close” button, and thank you for choosing EarthLink.

The most exciting part of the year, at least from the perspective of OpenNMS, is now upon us. In the next two months we have a number of awesome events happening.

Next week is our fourth annual OpenNMS Users Conference Europe. There is
still time to register (until Friday) if you want to join us in Germany for four days of classes and presentations:

We have also announced our next week-long training class to be held at company headquarters in Pittsboro, NC, USA the week of 4-8 June.

Next, our seventh (wow) annual developers conference, Dev-Jam 2012, will be held in Minneapolis, MN, USA the last week in June.

If you develop on OpenNMS, this is a great way to spend a week with most of the major contributors and to sharply hone your skills with respect to the OpenNMS code.

And now for the big news, we are also announcing the first ever OpenNMS Users Conference Americas to be held for three days starting 26 June.

Modeled on the European conference, the first day will consist of a seminar (taught by yours truly) covering the basics of OpenNMS. The last day will consist of a barcamp. This is an “unconference” where the attendees set the agenda. We’ll entertain suggestions for talks, vote on them, and then present the most popular ones. With most of the development team in attendance, pretty much any topic is up for grabs and expect it to be addressed by experts.

The middle day is very special. It is a standard conference day that we would like to use to focus on our community. That means you. We’ll be giving a roadmap presentation first thing, but then we’d love to fill the day with presentations by you on how you use OpenNMS.

If you are interested, send an e-mail to the call for papers: cfp@opennms.org telling us what you’d like to talk about. If it gets accepted, you’ll receive a complementary conference pass. I wish I could cover the air travel as well, but we will cover the conference, room and board for our speakers.

Hope to see you in person soon.

My wife Kelly got a Cuisinart espresso maker as a gift about a year and a half ago and has used it religiously! Every day she happily makes herself a latte. One morning last week her beloved espresso machine began to balk at making her morning coffee. I knew how sad this would make her so I was already determining how much it would cost to buy her a new one.

I needn’t have worried. Kelly called Cuisinart’s (now owned by Conair) support number and, unlike many companies today, spoke to a live person. Not just a live person, but a clueful, live person! After offering Kelly a few strategies to get her ailing espresso maker working, the helpful rep offered to replace the whole thing for free.

Yep. It didn’t matter that it was a gift and Kelly didn’t have the receipt, nor did it matter that it was a year and a half old. Cuisinart is shipping her a brand new espresso maker and taking back her broken one, for free!

At a time when so few companies remember who keeps them in business (ahem, their customers), Cuisinart goes above and beyond. Bravo!

I suppose some people need this.

It’s easy enough to decide to go to bed strictly at a certain time, but actually doing it is another story. We often get carried away in the late hours of the night, trying to knock off just a few more things we wanted to do, whether it’s for work or fun. The next day, we’re tired and filled with regret yet we don’t stop. If this sounds like you, it’s time to start “force quitting” yourself at the end of the day. Here’s how.

via “Force Quit” Yourself to Get Your Sleep Schedule Back on Track and Avoid Another Day of Fatigue.

Diagram.ly – it’s sorta like Visio, but free, and web-based.

Meetings.io – like webex, including conference calling and file and screen sharing.

Qama - a calculator that doesn’t give an answer until you provide a “reasonable” guess.

Udacity – a free computer science program.

Urbanchickens - dedicated to raising chickens in “non-traditional” environments (like cities).

I’ve been looking for a way to take the bus to work and think I’ve found it! There’s a Park and Ride lot just off Blue Ridge Road where a Triangle Transit bus departs at 9:07 AM. It stops at the Factory Outlet Mall at 9:22, from where I can ride my bike over to the office and be there by 9:30. I still have to drive to Blue Ridge Road but it beats driving all the way out to RTP.

I drove over to check out the P&R lot this morning and was pleasantly surprised to see it was almost entirely full! No bike racks, though, which was a disappointment. I would love to have a place to put my bike in the event that the bus bike racks are full and I have to leave it.

I might also consider buying a used bike to leave at the outlet mall so that I don’t have to haul it on the bus every day. As with the Park and Ride lot, there are no bike racks at the outlet mall. I’m not sure why major transit stops don’t have bike racks but I’ll see if I can get an answer.

Oh, and I tweeted yesterday that I could never commute by bus until there’s a bus dedicated to singing. I guess I’ll have to keep quiet or make quick friends with my fellow commuters!

A thread on Reddit about a restaurant customer leaving two pennies and a nasty note for bad service got me thinking I needed to blog about my time working for Applebee’s. Working as a server was the hardest job I’ve ever had and likely will have.

As I traveled the world in my previous jobs I was fascinated by the different ways different cultures pay their restaurant staff. In Australia there is no tipping as restaurant workers there get paid a full salary. Do you know what restaurant workers here in America get paid? Try $2.13 an hour. Yes, you can’t even buy a gallon of gas for that, but that’s a server’s base pay. The really sad thing is that that rate hasn’t changed since I waited tables at Applebee’s twenty years ago.

It was the summer of 1992. I had just gotten out of the Navy and was in Columbia, South Carolina, taking some community college courses before I started at N.C. State. On one of my first nights as a civilian again, my parents and I went out to a new restaurant in town: an Applebee’s close to home. A lively crowd and no shortage of attractive college-age waitresses made the place seem like a fun place to work. I filled out an application and was told to come back on a Sunday afternoon for an interview.

I showed up on Sunday as requested but was disappointed to learn that that particular restaurant had no openings. The company had openings at another of their restaurants at 2344 Broad River Road, way on the other side of the city. I wasn’t thrilled to have to drive that far, but hey: good-looking women and lively workplace, right? I signed up and looked forward to working my first shift.

If you’ve never worked as a server before you really can’t appreciate what it’s all about. It is hard work. You are constantly running from one thing to another, with people interrupting you along the way, depending on coworkers who are often near-strangers to get you what you need. If you don’t have a good memory and a good attitude you won’t last long. The hours are long, you come home each night smelling like food (or cigarettes), total strangers who have bad days take it out on you, you sometimes get stiffed on your tips, any food order screwups come out of your tips, and you’re not guaranteed anything but $2.13 for each hour of this thankless work. Some people thrive in the restaurant business and wait tables for many years. I did the work for just 9 months but it earned me undying respect for those who do it.

As for me, I wasn’t particularly good at waiting tables, mainly because of my difficulty remembering orders. My class schedule limited the shifts I could work, too, and the manager scheduled me for many of the shifts no one else wanted or could take. As a result I often got stuck with a shitty shift or a shitty set of tables. It was often working the patio, which was the closest thing to being in Siberia. I tried to make the best of it, though.

After a few weeks working there, I could get a sense of what kind of customer I’d be dealing with. I don’t suppose it’s changed much since then, but it was common to stereotype the hell out of customers. Part of your job as a server is to anticipate your customer’s needs, so the instant a customer walks in you’re already sizing them up. Is this person going to be reasonable or an asshole? Are they in a good mood or bad? Are they going to tip well or shaft me?

Some servers warned me that African Americans didn’t tip well. They told me that black people didn’t tip well. I found that black people tipped about the same as white people. I’d say the count between blacks and whites who didn’t leave a tip is about even (remember, I said I wasn’t the best at serving!).

I remember this one particular table of African Americans I served. It was a Saturday night and one of those rare nights when I had many tables to tend. They seemed to be well-dressed college students. As I took their drink orders, I noticed that they were sizing me up. No big deal, I would do what I always do: give them the best service I could (which, as I stated before, could’ve always been better!).

It wasn’t a moment after I had delivered their drinks when I was summoned back. One woman had just changed her mind about the Coke she had asked for. Could I bring a Sprite, please? No problem, I said, and fetched the drink.

I visited another table when I see them motioning again. The woman had changed her mind about the Sprite and now wanted water. Sure thing, I said, and returned with a water.

Visiting another table a moment later and it’s the woman again. Could she get a lemon in her water, she asks? I see that all eyes are on me, the table is about to fall out laughing, and instantly I get wise. They had been fucking with me.

“I’ll be happy to get you your lemon,” I say politely but with undisguised exasperation. Looking around the table, I asked “now, is there anything else anyone needs before I step away?!”
That could’ve gotten me in a lot of trouble, but instead the table fell out laughing! I laughed, too! I had instantly earned their respect, they were cool to me for the rest of the night, and they left a really fat tip! I never forgot that.

As for romance, the restaurant was full of it! We all knew which server was sleeping with the manager, back rubs were given freely whether one wanted them or not, and indecent proposals flew daily. Before long, I discovered that I was the object of one waitress’s desire, though I wasn’t really into her. She was borderline stalking me, actually, pretty much throwing herself at me. As we would pass in the kitchen, she would often say something sexual to me under her breath. I wasn’t used to that kind of attention (look at me now – good thing I never did get used to it!) and didn’t pay it any mind, though there were some waitresses that definitely got my attention. Though I asked a few of those sweet ladies out, I struck out every time. It must have been my honey mustard cologne.

I soon found out that it’s only after last call that the real party begins. Restaurant people work hard and they play hard, too. There’s always one bar that’s open at 5 AM and that’s where all the other restaurant people go after work.

Restaurant people treat other restaurant people well, because only restaurant people know what it’s like. I recall one night I had a large party seated in my section close to closing. Normally that would piss me off but then I rounded the corner to find about a dozen scantily-clad girls from the Hooters down the road smiling at me. Boy did my attitude change! Because they were restaurant people like me they were some of the nicest, most-understanding customers to serve. Also, because they were Hooters girls and had just gotten off work, they were loaded with cash and tipped me generously! I never forgot that, too.

I could tell right away that that jerk customer who left the nasty note and 2 cents has never worked on the other side of the table. If you have, you know what a tough job it is. To this day, I tip no less than 15%, even if the service is shitty. If the service is great, it’s 20% or more.

A few years ago I was ready to demand that restaurant workers be given a living wage instead of earning the absurdly low $2.13 + tips. Then I thought how wonderful it would be if every American had the chance to work for nothing but gratuities. If they did they wouldn’t look down at service workers ever again. If some asshole thinks it’s easy to depend on others’ generosity for his paycheck, let him try it for a while. Maybe it should be mandatory to work for tips at some point, the way some countries require military service. The smug feeling of entitlement some have would vanish overnight when they realize that it takes all kinds of people to make our society work.

So the next time you head out for dinner, remember to tip your waiters and waitresses and tell them thanks. It will mean more to them than you know.

More about the shift away from driving.

“Unfortunately for car companies,” Jordan Weissmann noted at TheAtlantic.com a couple weeks back, “today’s teens and twenty-somethings don’t seem all that interested in buying a set of wheels. They’re not even particularly keen on driving.”

Now a major new report from Benjamin Davis and Tony Dutzik at the Frontier Group and Phineas Baxandall, at the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, documents this unprecedented trend across a wide variety of indicators.

Their two big findings about young people and driving:

The average annual number of vehicle miles traveled by young people (16 to 34-year-olds) in the U.S. decreased by 23 percent between 2001 and 2009, falling from 10,300 miles per capita to just 7,900 miles per capita in 2009.

The share of 14 to 34-year-olds without a driver’s license increased by 5 percentage points, rising from 21 percent in 2000 to 26 percent in 2010, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

via Why Young Americans Are Driving So Much Less Than Their Parents – Commute – The Atlantic Cities.

What you see above is a graph supplied by my Zeo sleep headset showing how I slept last night. The green bars indicate dream sleep while the orange bars indicate wake events. My Zeo does a fantastic job of tracking my sleep but there are moments when it gets confused. For instance, the two orange bars to the left don’t indicate when I was physically awake, they show when I was experiencing lucidity in my dream. You see, my mind was fully awake and aware in my dream. I became aware that I was dreaming while I was dreaming!

I used this time to explore the dream environment, in this case a sprawling mountain vacation home. I floated off the ground, plunged my hands and head through the wall to see how it felt, and explored .. um, a few other fantasies. Maintaining lucidity takes a delicate balance, so I kept seeking out clocks to see if the numbers would change unexpectedly (a common dream sign). I also called for “clarity now!” but this didn’t enhance my focus as it sometimes does. I drifted back into dreaming, a bit confused about why I had difficulty maintaining lucidity. Only after waking for real did I remember the spinning technique.

The Zeo is great for tracking sleep but after four months of sleep tracking I’m growing a bit bored of just that. Where the Zeo would be immensely valuable is in signaling me whenever I enter dream sleep. That would make it easier for me to realize that I am dreaming and launch into lucidity. As of yet, Zeo does not offer this feature, though some enterprising Zeo owners are working on their own tools to do this.

In the future I hope to see more wakefulness spikes in my dream cycles!

One nation, on the road, indivisible.

This month’s Atlantic cover story, “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?,” has contributed to an ongoing national debate over whether Americans are more socially isolated than ever before, and whether our dependence on electronic communications is keeping us from forming meaningful social ties.

But a generation ago — long before the invention of social media — a man named Donald Appleyard was investigating how automotive traffic isolates us from one another and diminishes our human connections.

via Is Traffic Making Us Lonely? – Commute – The Atlantic Cities.

After years of constant sessions spent updating our respective calendars, Kelly and I recently began to share our calendar details directly. It’s been much easier to know who’s supposed to be where, and it all happens automatically.

Why is it that coordinating appointments is still difficult if not impossible? I subscribe to a lot of mailing lists for charities and the like, and each one has important dates that they share with me. Yet, I have to manually add the information to my electronic calendar, risking typos and errors in the process.

Why hasn’t this been automated by now? An appointment has a set number of common fields, like date, time, description, participants, etc. It should be easy to standardize, yet everyone still does things the hard way. Why?

The iCalendar format was invented to solve this problem and most mail clients now support it. Still, it’s rare that I get an iCalendar invitation in my email: usually an event is described only in plain text. Why is this?

Facebook’s events are convenient for announcing events but this is only available to Facebook users. If someone came up with a easy-to-use calendaring server that put event details into an iCalendar format reached through a shortcut link, I think it would be heavily popular.

Frustrated by the glacial pace of Virgin Mobile to add newer phones to it’s prepaid service, a friend alerted me to a new phone provider called Ting. Ting was started by Tucows, the first company to bring competitive pricing to domain registrations, so I have high hopes Ting can shake up the telecom world.

Ting offers pay-for-what-you-use pricing plans. If you don’t use the minutes or data you signed up for, Ting credits your account. You have very finite control over how your plan looks as well, choosing very specific amounts of minutes, texts, and data you think you’ll use.

Ting also offers tethering with its phones, allowing you to share your phone’s Internet service with up to 5 computers. Ting also supports power users and seems open to allowing its subscribers to extend their phones’ functionality.

Overall, Ting looks to be setting itself up to make some waves in the mobile phone provider market. I hope to purchase one of Ting’s phones soon and give their service a test drive.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the use of “sudo” vs using a root password.  It’s a lot simpler than many make it out to be.

• On a system that uses a root password, all administrators use a shared root password.
• On a system that uses “sudo”, all administrators use their own passwords.
• There is no reason why you can’t do both.

Some people argue about a Linux distribution’s default setting, when they could simply change the setting after installation and forget about it.

• To enable a root password:
  $ sudo passwd root
• To disable a root password:
  $ sudo passwd -l root
• To start using sudo:
  # apt-get install sudo
# adduser username sudo
• To stop using sudo:
  # gpasswd -d username sudo
# apt-get remove --purge sudo (optional)
• To run a “su-like” shell using “sudo”:
  $ sudo -s (runs a normal shell)
  or
  $ sudo -i (runs a login shell)

Personally, I have gotten used to disabling my root password and the using either sudo -i or ssh root@hostname.  That’s one less password for me to remember, and one less password that can be probed on the network.

But you don’t have to be like me… you do what feels right to you!

RTP seemed like a great idea 60 years ago but the tide has turned against the idea of putting job centers in the boonies. The younger workers (you know, the ones graduating from the schools that put the triangle in “Research Triangle Park”) don’t want to own cars. They want to work where they live. They want to work in a dynamic environment, not one with “large amounts of green space.” Collaboration with others spurs new ideas, not navel-gazing in green pastures (or former pastures, as is the case with RTP).

Skyrocketing gas prices and different priorities among today’s younger workforce are what dooms RTP. Yes, RTP could survive if it can become a place where one can not just work but also live and play, but it’s an uphill battle that RTP cannot win. Durham and Raleigh are light years ahead of RTP in this regard and that’s where the job growth will go.

Two years ago, concerned about competition from other research parks within the state and around the globe, RTP hired a New York urban design firm to update its master plan for the first time since the park was formed in 1959.

Since then, the urgency has also heightened as new competitors – Durham’s American Tobacco Campus and N.C. State University’s Centennial Campus, to name two – have attracted numerous start-ups.

The park, meanwhile, has been hurt by appearing to be content to be a suburban, isolated campus environment, said Joel Marcus, CEO of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, a California company that has been in the park since 1998 and today owns nearly a million square feet of lab space in RTP.

“That’s really not today’s world,” he said.

via RTP seeks to be more inviting for smaller companies, quick innovation – Economy – NewsObserver.com.

I had the pleasure Thursday of chaperoning Hallie and her 4th grade classmates on a trip to Carolina Beach, NC. I had been looking forward to it for weeks and it lived up to its promise.

We woke up at 5:20 Thursday and made it to the school at 6, where kids sat and chatted in the cafeteria while waiting for stragglers. At 6:30 the bus headed down the highway, and I followed it with three other dads in the minivan.

We dads stopped once at a McDonalds outside of Clayton to get beverages. By the time we got on the road again, the kids’ buses were gone. We didn’t see them again until an hour later, when we decided on a pit stop again. We didn’t see the buses again until we were all pulling into Carolina Beach.

Our first stop was the North Carolina Aquarium, which is probably my least favorite aquarium ever. The horribly inappropriate sign about lobsters was still there. I blogged about it before, but imagine seeing a sign at an elephant exhibit at the zoo saying “Isn’t it beautiful how ivory keys look on a piano?”

I kept my criticism to myself, though, letting the kids explore the aquarium to their desire. I did note that it the exhibits kept the kids’ attention all of 20 minutes before we found ourselves in line for the gift shop. I think we probably spent more time sorting through the junk there than we did looking at anything else.

It was a relief when it was time to get lunch. The kids piled into the bus for the 1/4 mile ride down to the picnic area. We ate our bag lunches at the picnic tables and chased down loose bags blown by the strong wind. It took a while before the buses departed but eventually we headed to Kure Beach to board our Carolina Ocean Studies excursion to Masonboro Island.

We took the Winner Cruise Queen out to Masonboro Island via the Intercoastal Waterway. The wind was whipping hard and I was concerned that we’d have a bumpy ride. It turns out the cruise out was pretty smooth and no one got sick. The kids got a lecture about sea life on the upper deck while the adults got instructions about the day’s events below.

We pulled up to Masonboro Island and formed a human tunnel for the kids to head up the beach. The group was divided into three stations for the island activities: one for shell collection, one for crabbing, and one for exploring the marsh.

Hallie’s favorite was the marsh activity. She became really good and flushing tiny crabs from their holes in the marsh. She and Lina thought the crabbing was frustrating. The shell collection was fun, though the wind was blasting so hard that it was nearly impossible to hear.

I kept looking out at the current in Masonboro inlet. It was incredible how quickly the water there was flowing! I was amazed at the waves being kicked up by the shoals and how difficult it must be to navigate a boat through there. I can imagine that any dredging authorities do on that channel is short-lived.

As the kids walked single file down the beach for the return trip to the mainland, I got to hold Hallie’s hand. It was the highlight of the trip for me, having her be so comfortable with me around with her friends and classmates. I know these days might not last and made the most of it. It beat any treasure I might have found on the beach!

Our boat returned a bit later than expected. The kids were tired and were snacking on the dock around the time the chaperones were more or less cut loose. The dads hit the road and were slowed by Wilmington rush hour traffic. I had a raging headache by that time and got about 40 miles out of town before I asked if one of my carpooling buddies might drive for a while. After a 20 minute nap I felt much better, though I sat in the passenger seat the rest of the way back.

We all got back to the school around 7 PM, tired but happy. I’m glad I made the time to be there!

For those of you who missed us in New York and the Bay Area this week, never fear.  We’re getting around.    Come see us at:

• April 28 – 29: LinuxFest Northwest, Bellingham WA
• April 30 – May 2: OpenCloudConf, Sunnyvale CA
• May 6 – 10: Interop Las Vegas – Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, NV
• May 8: Goldman Sachs Cloud Computing Conference – Rosewood Sand Hill, Menlo Park CA
• May 16: AWS User Group Amsterdam – Amsterdam, Netherlands

Find the person in the Eucalyptus t-shirt / white dress shirt / hoodie and say hello.  Check out our full events schedule.  If you’ve got an event you’d like to add to that list, let me know.

There seems to be a common misconception about Debian’s package manager “apt”, that the command “dist-upgrade” is used to upgrade to a new release. It is, but it isn’t. I wanted to clarify that here.

Basically, there are 4 things that you might want to do as part of upgrading a system.

• apt-get update – updates the list of available packages and versions
• apt-get upgrade – upgrade packages that you already have
• apt-get dist-upgrade – upgrade packages that you already have, PLUS install any new dependencies that have come up
• edit the sources files – change the release that you are tracking

That means that to freshen up your packages to the latest versions on your current release, you should do “apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade“. On some systems that track “testing”, which changes often, I do this almost daily.

When you’re ready to “really upgrade” to a new release, you edit your sources files in /etc/apt/sources and change the release names. If the source lists contain proper release names, like “etch”, “lenny”, “squeeze” or “wheezy”; then you change these names to the new release that you want (see http://www.debian.org/releases/). If the source lists contain symbolic names like “stable”, “testing” and “unstable”, you do not need to change anything. When a new release is ready, the Debian people will change the symbols to point to the new release names. For example, right now, stable=squeeze and testing=wheezy.

Note 1 – “unstable” never points to a named release… it’s the pre-release proving ground for packages, used before are ready for inclusion in the testing release.

Note 2 – Don’t let these symbolic names fool you:

• “Stable” means “old, tried, tested, and rock solid”.  It’s a very conservative choice.
• “Testing” does not mean “chaotic”. It is roughly the equivalent of Red Hat’s Fedora. It’s new stuff, and each package changes on its own schedule, but they usually play well together.
• “Unstable” is not nearly as unstable as the name implies. It’s like a beta release that may be updated daily.

After your source lists look OK, you do the same thing you’ve always done: “apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade“”apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade“.

If you’re running Ubuntu, the release names are at http://releases.ubuntu.com/. And they’ve made a nice wrapper script called “do-release-upgrade” that basically edits your source lists and does the dist-upgrade for you (it also does some other nice steps, like letting you review the changes).

So there it is… fear not the “dist-upgrade”. In fact, most of the time, it is what you’ll want to run. It will make sure that you have all of the dependencies that you need.

Leo Suarez of the Raleigh Connoisseur has some similar thoughts on Raleigh’s flag that I’ve had. I think the time might be ripe to update the city flag and get something we can all be proud to fly!

In other cities, the flag is a sense of pride. Chicago and Washington DC have great flags and if you’re lucky, you may find citizens with tattoos of it. (anyone in Raleigh can claim having this?)

In 2004, the North American Vexillological Association did a survey against 150 US city flags. Respondents answered on a 0 to 10 scale on what they thought were a well designed flags. We ranked 56 on that list, highest North Carolina city by the way, so flag design may not be a huge feather in our cap.

Still, I want to ask this question; Why are there so few Raleigh flags around town?

via The Raleigh Connoisseur (April 25, 2012) – The City of Raleigh Flag.

 

So long story short, I’ve decided to attempt building a guitar by hand- mainly because I’m an idiot. It doesn’t have to be beautiful or well formed or even sound good, I just want to make my own. So… I went to Lowes, bought some wood, bought some tools, and got to work.

Supplies:

• 1″x3″x4′ Poplar board.
• 1″x4″x2′ Poplar board.
• 1″x6″x2′ Poplar board.
• 1″x12″x2′ Poplar board.

Tools:

• Coping saw
• 1/2″ chisel
• Hammer
• Miter box
• Surform shaver

Note that the design I’m working on is lopsided-the bottom half is larger than the top half. The main reason was simply because I wanted to keep costs down and go with the 12″ wide board for the back.

Here’s the template I came up with- remember that I’m a lefty, so the horn would be on top and the ball will be on the bottom (and the strings would be facing us). Note that the big board here will be on the back, and the section of neck seen here will be tapering in like a heel cut.

The straight-through neck idea; I plan on gluing and clamping these three boards together, then clamping and gluing them on top of the larger board’s cutout, then sanding the edges down. Note the “teeth” at the bottom  of the lower board- that’s because I’m using a coping saw rather than a band saw, so I have to take small pieces off at a time.

The length you see here is the same as my Fender strat, so the scale should be correct. The small section of board above the neck was extra length from the neck.I’m debating using that as the headstock and attaching it at an angle like a Gibson.

Not pictured is the 1/4″ red oak laminate that I’m going to use for the fingerboard. I’m not sure what to do for the bridge, nut and probable pickups- I might just go buy a broken used guitar and strip out the electronics.

I’ll post more updates as I have them. So far I’ve put about 4 hours of work into it and <$100 in wood.