Blog

Fine way to begin the week, all mornings should start this way. 4:30 am - up -> check email/sites/iced tea/plan workout 5:00 am - stretching/workout 6:00 am - water plants/lawn (grass is sprouting and garden is showing some promise) 6:30 am - breakfast (sausage/bagel/hashbrowns/eggs/coffee/smoothie) 7:00 am - piano practice 7:30 am - prep for work (shower/pack/plan) 8:15 am - out the door Bonus: new headphones at work w/ some degree of noise isolation may help save my sanity.

Spent the holiday weekend working on the yard. We tried to find landscape service, but they were all either too busy to return calls or continually canecelled meetings. Hence, DIY. For the last two months, I raced home from work to shovel down a quick dinner and get outside and work until it turned dark. Everything from breaking up90 square feet of concrete to pulling out and endless number of daylillies. ...

This passage from ‘The Art of Fielding’ really rang true for me. Schwartz cherished these private, diligent hours. All day long, no matter how hard he worked, no matter what he accomplished, a voice in his head berated him for his laziness, his sloth, his inability to concentrate. His concerns were trivial. His knowledge of history was shallow. His Latin sucked, and his Greek was worse. How did he expect to grasp Aurelius and Epictetus, inquired the voice, when he could barely string to Latin words together? Only here, long after midnight, when everyone else was sleeping, when nothing was expected of him, could Schwartz convince himself that he was working hard enough. These hours felt stolen, added to his life. The voice fell quiet. Even the pain in his knees subsided. p. 102

Reading Grant Achatz’s book on Alinea is a pretty fair exercise in self-aggrandization, but there was a nice moment I pulled out. There was a discussion about not wanting table linens and the of water glasses damaging table surfaces. They worked to find the correct water temperature that would not cause condensation, while also being appropriatly cool. They were able to retain the aesthetics of a clean looking table design w/out compromising on the customer’s need for a refreshing drink. ...

Having spent far too much time dealing w/ academics, I’ve had the time to gain a few opinins via both good and awful experiences. The Bad Stuff bad teachers Bad teachers can kill your will to learn. There were plenty of classes where I realized how little work was needed and I was able to make better use of my time by hitting the library or preparing for other classes. Classes that expect little from their students will get that back in return. You learn to see who is actually burning calories trying to communicate and who is filling in the hours, or even worse doing damage to your will to learn. There’s a trait you can see for those who have the gift of appearing knowledgeable but there’s a pretty shallow pond to that knowledge and you realize that they know more about how to keep their job than how to teach. ...

Way late on this, but this draft has been sitting around for awhle. It was a pretty awful year for films, w/ Moneyball being the only film that sticks out in my memory. Music (no particular order): Bill Frisell - All we are Saying Bon Iver - s/t Elbow - Build a Rocket Boys Fitz and the tandrums - Pickin’ up the Pieces Goddamn electric bill - Jazz The great book of john - s/t Jason isbell and the 400 unit - Here we Rest My Morning Jacket - Circuital Russian Circles -Empros Tom Waits - Bad as Me TV on the Radio - Nine Types of Light The War on Drugs - Slave Ambient Books (no particular order): ...

Making some progress in getting our puppet manifests under a capistrano script. Everything has been under version control for awhile, but it’s been my plan to get a proper deployment configuration set up. Before I could get capistrano set up, I needed to make sure that puppet was running out of a new path, since cap is going to be removing and recreating symlinks. mkdir /etc/puppet/current mv /etc/puppet/* /etc/puppet/current /etc/puppet/puppet.conf [main] tagmap = /etc/puppet/current/tagmail.conf [master] modulepath = /etc/puppet/current/modules The missing piece was remembering that we run the puppetmaster out of passenger and passenger was not finding the path changes. ...

Spent too much time moving this over from wordpress to jekyll, but I did take the time to pull together a bunch of old entries from other blogs. It was a trip to go back and read through stuff well over ten years old and then promptly dump most of it. I have a half-dozen wanna-be articles ready to be written, now that I’m done poking around the config side I need to sit down and do the hard part of actually writing.

Getting older has made recovery times slower and a couple of injuries are forcing me to slow down. I’m committed to taking time off now that will allow me to return to heavier lifting in about a year. My goal is to continue lifting until at least 45 yrs old. I’ve hit most of my lifting goals with the exception of a 500 lb deadlift (I was at least two years away from that). ...

Thinking back on taking programming programming classes in school, java and c++, I couldn’t have been more bored. I had no reason to care about flipping the order of characters or determining how long a string was. It all meant nothing to me. The tiny little details that at the end of a semester added up to .. nothing. Then I found myself working with linux and learning about bash, and now .. I can actually do something with code. I can write cronjobs that execute when I need them to, I can write scripts that execute when the server starts up. I can ensure that services are running .. I could do real work. ...