[Food] White Trash-tastic

I had to counter, and fast! Chana Masala bequeathed me with a certain sophistication I was ready to shed (previous Eat Club). I called my ma (Hey ma! Get off the dang roof!) and unearthed a favorite of mine from growin' up in rural MN. It's one part casserole one part terrible for you. Perfect.

Pizza Pop-Up
1lb ground beef, browned (the higher the fat content, the better)
1 can pizza sauce (stay away from Chef Boyardee sauce)
1 onion, sliced
1 pepper, sliced
1 can black olives, sliced
1 large package mozzarella cheese (again, don't skimp on the fat)

Mix together

Place mixture on top of 1 can biscuits, cut into quarters

Bake for ~45min at 375F

Add freshly grated parmesan cheese for classy touch

Meatless works just as well. Last night I decided to substitute in some cherry tomatoes for my vegitariat friend.

Bad Mother Bars (hereafter known as Ridiculous Bars)
K thru 12 I went to school with a set of female fraternal twins. One was lovely and perfect, the other relatively normal. Their mother was a total bitch to the non-perfect one. Awful, awful mother. Makes good bars.

Make some rice crispie bars (on box)
Melt 1 can of sweetened condensed milk with 1 bag of caramels
Pour mixture onto RCBs
Make some more RCBs
Place on top of RCB/caramel goo
Melt chocolate chips
Top 'er off

Many thanks to GeistX and Nerdwife for the libations and entertaining company. I'm glad you've been enjoying the culinary trip 'round the world. I have a proposition: I think we should spice up Eat Club with a rotating 4th. Maybe people we always intended on getting to know but just didn't get around to it? Wandering bums on the street? Starving friends?

[ITMFA] I reiterate...

What does it take to impeach this guy?

Sunday article on the Boston Globe indicates that Cheney's legal aide reviews legislation to help remove provisions that would limit Presidential power.

WASHINGTON -- The office of Vice President Dick Cheney routinely reviews pieces of legislation before they reach the president's desk, searching for provisions that Cheney believes would infringe on presidential power, according to former White House and Justice Department officials.

...

The Bush-Cheney administration has used such statements to claim for itself the option of bypassing a ban on torture, oversight provisions in the USA Patriot Act, and numerous requirements that they provide certain information to Congress, among other laws.

Previous vice presidents have had neither the authority nor the interest in reviewing legislation. But Cheney has used his power over the administration's legal team to promote an expansive theory of presidential authority. Using signing statements, the administration has challenged more laws than all previous administrations combined.

[Required Reading] "Tyranny of the Christian Right"

I strongly recommend everyone read this post on AlterNet, "Tyranny of the Christian Right". Despite the hot-button title, it is actually quite full of a rational approach to what I feel is becoming a major concern in America. This article has managed to manifest in terms far more thorough as well as elegant than me, my viewpoints (though I do not agree with all parts of the article, but overall I agree with most of it). Here is an excerpt:

America's ragged divides

Those who want to fight Christian nationalism will need a long-term and multifaceted strategy. I see it as having three parts -- electoral reform to give urban areas fair representation in the federal government, grassroots organizing to help people fight Christian nationalism on the ground and a media campaign to raise public awareness about the movement's real agenda.

My ideas are not about reconciliation or healing. It would be good if a leader stepped forward who could recognize the grievances of both sides, broker some sort of truce, and mend America's ragged divides. The anxieties that underlay Christian nationalism's appeal -- fears about social breakdown, marital instability and cultural decline -- are real. They should be acknowledged and, whenever possible, addressed. But as long as the movement aims at the destruction of secular society and the political enforcement of its theology, it has to be battled, not comforted and appeased.

...

According to Steven Hill of the Center for Voting and Democracy, the combined populations of Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, North and South Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Alaska equal that of New York and Massachusetts, but the former states have a total of nine more votes in the Electoral College (as well as over five times the votes in the Senate). In America, conservatives literally count for more.

Liberals should work to abolish the Electoral College and to even out the composition of the Senate, perhaps by splitting some of the country's larger states.(A campaign for statehood for New York City might be a place to start.) It will be a grueling, Herculean job. With conservatives already indulging in fantasies of victimization at the hands of a maniacal Northeastern elite, it will take a monumental movement to wrest power away from them. Such a movement will come into being only when enough people in the blue states stop internalizing right-wing jeers about how out of touch they are with "real Americans" and start getting angry at being ruled by reactionaries who are out of touch with them.

After all, the heartland has no claim to moral authority. The states whose voters are most obsessed with "moral values" have the highest divorce and teen pregnancy rates. The country's highest murder rates are in the South and the lowest are in New England. The five states with the best-ranked public schools in the country -- Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Jersey and Wisconsin -- are all progressive redoubts. The five states with the worst -- New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi and Louisiana -- all went for Bush.

The canard that the culture wars are a fight between "elites" versus "regular Americans" belies a profound split between different kinds of ordinary Americans, all feeling threatened by the others' baffling and alien values. Ironically, however, by buying into right-wing elite-baiting, liberals start thinking like out-of-touch elites. Rather than reflecting on what kind of policies would make their own lives better, what kind of country they want to live in, and who they want to represent them -- and then figuring out how to win others to their vision -- progressives flail about for ideas and symbols that they hope will appeal to some imaginary heartland rube. That is condescending.

[Question] IT, PS2, and working at the liberry

How can I play connect my PS2 to my weaponized laptop? I could use some GTA at the liberry.

[Work] Its 8pm on a Friday and...

I'm at work. Singing the on call blues. The Netbackup environment post-switch firmware update. On a reconfiguration reboot of a media manager the tapes reassigned themselves to new /dev/rmt/X assignments, which I guess is not unexpected as we are using the dynamic qlogic drivers. The version of Netbackup we are using likes to know that tape drive /dev/rmt/Xcbn is a certain assignment, so me (and a co-worker) are re-doing the links. After a few hours of detective work I have whipped up a script to match the physical device assignment to the correct /dev/rmt/X* link. Here is my script:

#!/bin/ksh -x

# mk-tape_links.sh ##
#
#
###

###
# variables
###
TAPEOPTS="b bn c cb cbn cn h hb hbn hn l lb lbn ln m mb mbn mn n u ub ubn un"
TAPEDIR=/dev/rmt
TAPES=/var/tmp/tape-nums.txt
TAPEDRVS="0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12"
PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin

export PATH TAPEOPTS TAPEDIR HATAPEDRVS

# for links to work correctly, must be in /dev/rmt
cd ${TAPEDIR}

# loop through all the tape drives to be defined
# the numbers correspond to /dev/rmt/X* links.
for x in ${TAPEDRVS}
do
# pull the drive physical path out of definition file
DEVICE=`/usr/bin/grep "^${x} " ${TAPES} | /usr/bin/awk '{print $2}'`
export DEVICE
/usr/bin/ln -s ${DEVICE}: ${x}
# loop through and create all the options
for y in ${TAPEOPTS}
do
/usr/bin/ln -s ${DEVICE}:${y} ${x}${y}
done
done

/var/tmp/tapes-num.txt is formated like this:

0 ../../devices/pci@23d,700000/SUNW,qlc@1,1/fp@0,0/st@w500104f000771e2a,0
1 ../../devices/pci@23d,700000/SUNW,qlc@1,1/fp@0,0/st@w500104f000771d4c,0
2 ../../devices/pci@23d,700000/SUNW,qlc@1,1/fp@0,0/st@w500104f000771e45,0
...

Probably an easier way to do it, but it works and is recreateable as I feel this will happen again.

[Game] Dawn of War: Winter Assault

I am a gamer, not hardcore, but I enjoy FPS, RTS, turn based stratedgy, and simulators. One of the better RTS games I had picked up recently (well ok, almost a year ago) was Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War. It is set in the dark and grim future where all mankind has is war. You command Imperial Space Marines, Mysterious Eldar, Barbaric Orks, or the Ruinous Powers of Chaos. In single player campagin mode, you are a Company Commander of the Blood Ravens Chapter of Space Marines. In a surprisingly interesting storyline, each mission you complete moves you a step down the story that includes twists and turns and even betrayl. It reminded me of the richness of story found in Warcraft 3. In a few missions, you fight with the Imperial Guard, humans with nothing more than guts and guns in a universe of aliens, mutants, the mystical, and the unreal. I thought it would be nice to play them and in one mission you do, but you cannot really use them more than as a stop gap against an Orkish horde. The Winter Assault expansion is different, the Imperial Guard are now the full-on playable race, with their own units, strengths and weaknesses. It focuses on having you build an overlapping, cooperative force, as without massed tactics and unit cohesion, the Guard break and run easily. The graphics, as in the first one are very well done as are the sound effects and ambient music. For anyone who remembers the game WH40k: Final Liberation (based on WH40K Epic, where you get to control Titans), DoW is similar and easily (at least for me) as much fun. I recommend it.

Other games I am currently playing:

Masters of Orion 3
Star Wars: Empire at War (with the Improved Venator mod as I love that ship)
Star Wars: Republic Commandos (for the millionth time)
Rome: Total War + Barbarian Invasion

[Mental Health] Did something just snap?

No, but I feel a bit better today. I had been having a lot of pressure lately, not that anyone could notice with my 'BattleCry' rant post. Strange, it took going on call, a usually stressful affair, to take the pressure off.

[Survey/Sci-Fi] Materialism in a post-scarcity economy

An interesting idea has been rolling around in my head the last couple days. Imagine we end up with engines of true creation: nanotechnology, matter-pattern replication, pretty much any technology which given energy and raw elements can construct a perfect copy of any physical object. Ask for platinum ingots, you get platinum ingots. Ask for an egg-salad sandwich, you get an egg-salad sandwich. Numerous science fiction versions of this have been considered. So, given that we invent the technology to create perfect replicas of anything, and have sufficient energy and resources to create such replicas (and we show the wisdom to not use such technology to destroy ourselves), name FIVE things or less that you would personally choose to have perfectly replicated for you to own (ala austere desert island list). I'll stipulate that you cannot replicate a whole person, although a set of spare replacement organs from your own genetic code is fair game. You also cannot replicate things which are unique and unreplicatable by their nature (a particular piece of land overlooking the Mississippi River, for example). Assume replication is perfect at the atomic (but not quantum) level, and can be up to the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Assume that you have all the basics of living provided (food, clothing, basic shelter, medical care). Alternately, name FIVE things or less that you would want to own that currently exist and are unique and you would want to prohibit from being replicated (a specific piece of real estate, a particular artwork, etc.) I'll post my own choices in the comments. What would you choose?

[Relgion] BattleCry and why it scares me

"Only a sith deals in absolutes." - Obi-Wan Kenobi, Revenge of the Sith

UPDATE (5/16/2006): Ok so I've slept on this and spoke with some friends. I don't redact what I've said. I still believe that such gatherings serve no purpose other than to promote an agenda of passive hatred and intolerance, but as a friend points out, becoming outraged over this only serves their purposes. Outraged should be saved for the real Hitler Youth, and not these gatherings. A lot of my reaction centers on my distrust of organized religion and their apparent abuse of power. I also feel frustrated that we have moved into an irrational post-modern world, where no amount of reason, evidence, or discussion can change people's minds. Two-way debate is apparently dead. How do we re-open channels to discussion, where we can agree to disagree, and accept other's views, religion, feelings, orientations, strenghts and weaknesses?

One other point I need to make. They have a right to their freedom of speech and their freedom of beliefs, just like I have my right to criticism them. That is the beauty of the rapidly evaporating Bill of Rights. It provides a framework for people with difference to co-exist, that is as long as both sides respect the other's rights and freedoms, something that is disappearing rapidly from this country. So BattleCry members, wrap yourselves in whatever blanket of comfort you need, just know that there will be those who contradict you and they are not sinners and they may not even be your enemy.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060511_battle_cry_theocracy/

Holy shit.

I mean really, holy shit.

“This is war. And Jesus invites us to get into the action, telling us that the violent—the ‘forceful’ ones—will lay hold of the kingdom.” - Ron Luce, founder BattleCry

“I will keep my eyes on the battle, submitting to Your code even when I don’t understand..." - Ron Luce, founder BattleCry

You know I was once Catholic until I was 11, then Atheist until 24, now I am quasi-Agnostic. I now have my own form of spirituality, as I found nothing in religion, science, or philosphy to classify my understanding of faith in life, the universe, and everything. I am not violent, but I have to say things like this want me to violence. To see the youth of this country so deluded and brainwashed by the mis-interpreted and twisted dogma of the extremist/fundamentalist evangelical agenda really upsets me.

When I was a Catholic, our Priest spoke of tolerance, acceptance, and love for everyone, even those who do not like you or agree with you, we were 'all God's children'.

When I was an athiest, I tried to be a decent human being. Treating others with respect and accepting different view points.

I feel to each their own, as long as their own does not interfere with my liberty or life. This interferes. This interferes in a big way.

Smoke some pot all of you BattleCry memebers, have some sex (or masturbate) and lighten the fuck up. Seriously, you guys seem like the Hitler Youth movement. Wrapped in American flags and spouting your intrepetation of the Bible and preaching your version of the 'final solution'. You are no different a religious zealot than the extremist fundamentalists of islam who see to have the rule of islam forcefully installed on the world. Have we reverted back 1000 years to the time of the Crusades?

It is not hard to imagine in a few years we have a open police state (we have a hidden one currently) where you are imprisioned without question for not towing the religious party line.

On a side note, troops to the border of Mexico??? WTF?

[Mental Mutterings] Musings on the nature of Time

Time.

The great constant, or so we perceive. Time is a prevelant defining factor of our lives. We are born, we live for a variable period of it, and we die. Between birth and death we do some other stuff, most of life attempts to extend time and cheat death in the attempt of immortality through the transmission of genetic material on to the next generation.

Time.

It is a filter that separates our souls from each other. Time and space, linked, we cannot exist in two places at two times at once. Death is a removal of this filter, we enter timelessness. Do we become one with each other and that of all there is? We are already a part of that, we are made of the stuff of stars and the universe.

Time.

Pre-destination or free-will? We experience life with a 0.5ms lag. What we sense occurs 0.5ms before our brain processes it. Our brain compensates this time lag. But still our being lives in a future from what our consciousness tells us.

Time.

We are analog entities, yet we feel the need to split time into discrete quanta. Jagged peaks that are the ticks of the clock. Solid barriers that delineate one second from the next. But this is an illusion, it only exists if we look at a clock. Without clocks life passes in a simuflow of existence. We are not mindful of age, as without clocks age is meaningless.

Time.

The great equalizer, creator, destroyer. Over time all is turned to dust and all is created.

Time.

Is relative. As we move, it changes. As you near the speed of light, time slows within your frame of reference. At the speed of light, time stops. Light exists both in time, as it can move through space over time, and beyond time, as at the speed of light time stops, faster than it and causality is reveresed.

Time.

It is an illusion, lunch time doubly so.

[Musings] American Culture...deep as a mud puddle

Just commenting on something I have noticed since cancelling cable. People here do not have much to talk about besides what happened last night on TV. How vapid. I realized this when I was in a remote class this week surrounded by other IT people. The topics that often arouse, when asked 'what did you do last night?', the answer, with 80% accuracy was, 'watched X on TV.'

Damn, come on we have better things to talk about. The top three things most discussed at an American workplace I am willing to bet is:

1. TV
2. the weather
3. sports

I care very little about all three, which means I often used to find it hard to talk to co-workers, or worse I am avoided since I do not watch TV. Or rather used to, at my new job most of my co-workers are like me and cancelled TV, or simply just don't watch it. It is kind of refreshing topics most often do not revolve around the top three. I feel lucky. We talk about politics (in small doses), books, activities, food, etc.

Wake up America, TV enslaves you, controls you, pollutes your mind. Turn it off, go outside, read a book, play a video game, take a walk.

I re-iterate that since dropping TV my mind feels clearer and cleaner. It also challenges me to figure out ways to have conversations with others that do not revolve around TV.

[Government] No Such Agency

The NSA has been attempting to keep a database of every phonecall made to, from, or entirely within the United States since at least 2001. And they are doing it with the help of AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth.

The Bush Administration has halted the congressional investigation into illegal NSA wiretapping by refusing to grant security clearances to the Justice Department attorneys responsible for the investigation (Justice Department: "We are going to investigate you." NSA: "No you aren't, you can't, we're not going to give you clearance to know anything about what we are doing." Justice Department: "Okay." NSA: "Suck it."). The Bush administration even blocked Rep. Nancy Pelosi's attempt to find out which members of congress had been briefed on the program by classifying the list of their names (although Pelosi herself was likely briefed on much of these programs).

NSA whistleblower Russell Tice cannot blow the whistle to congress because the members of the House and Senate intelligence committees are not being given security clearance to hear his complaint.

Bush's nominee to head the CIA is the General who ran and defended all these illegal programs at NSA. The president apparently lied about it. The Attorney General may have perjured himself lied about it while not under oath before the house Judiciary committee.

Unchecked power of this kind is as great a threat to us as terrorism is. This is a an unprecedented threat to human rights. These illegal acts must cease, and the people responsible for them must be held accountable.

Oh, and some small props are due to Qwest, the only one of the major telecoms that didn't cave to the NSA.

UPDATE: BellSouth claims they didn't collude with the NSA.

UPDATE: Verizon too.

[Politics] DFL CD5 Convention

Keith Ellison.

Ugh.

While it was nice that the 5th district convention saw fit to endorse a candidate for Congress in fairly short order (instead of taking 15 ballots to do it), their choice leaves me wanting. Several of the candidates were more impressive: Mike Erlandson (who pulled out early since he was not going to abide by the endorsement), Gail Dorfman, and my own candidate Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer. Ellison just didn't seem to have the gravitas, the intellect, or the details down. While a charismatic man, his speeches were fairly canned and stilted, his issues of limited impact in the grand scheme, and his overall political thrust just isn't where the I think the DFL needs to be right now. Never before have I been less impressed by a slate of state and federal level candidates as I have been with this electoral cycle. The only race I have any real enthusiasm for is the gubernatorial run by Becky Lourey. Go Becky!

There is still a lot of work to do, and I'll be there to help get it done in June in Rochester at the state convention, but the Democratic party in Minnesota seems to be having a crisis of picking a coherent identity.

On the upside (I hope), the 6th Congressional District Republicans have seen fit to endorse that raving right-wing religious loony Michelle Bachmann. The DFL candidate in the 6th should hopefully make a serious challenge in what has traditionally been a conservative district.

The CD-5 convention was a zoo, as expected. Eleven candidates running for congress, eight of whom initially sought endorsement, lead me to think I might have been there all night. I was an alternate and did not get to vote, but if it had gone long that situation might very well have changed. As it stood, I got out of there in plenty of time to see Osmo Vänskä conduct Shostakovich tonight. I'd have gladly given up the Minnesota Orchestra in order to endorse a better candidate, but it was not to be. I'll obviously support whoever the DFL candidate for congress is, I'm just not sure yet if Keith Ellison will be getting my vote in the primary.

UPDATE: Shostakovich - fantastic. Golijov, great, and Dawn Upshaw is the least annoying soprano I've ever heard. That second song 'Lúa Descolorida' just nailed me. Mahler - the Adagietto (4th movement) is wonderful, but the rest of Symphony No. 5 is an overlong, incoherent epic mess like most of Mahler's works I've heard. Wonderfully played though, as always.

[Justice] Moussaoui Sentence

Life in prison

The use of the death penalty in our fair country is one of the deepest shames I have for being an American. The facts are quite clear, it's not a deterrent. It is cruel and unusual. Plus a system that allows for the execution of the mentally retarded, the elderly, juveniles, and the potentially innocent is abhorrent and unable to be entrusted with such decisions.

The most frightening aspect of the death penalty is the idea of giving the government absolute power over life and death. They can barely educate school children, assist the impoverished, or even pronounce difficult words, such as nuclear.

I am proud of those jurors. The pressure to kill a 9/11 terrorist must be enormous coupled with the wrenching testimony of the victims' family members. Certain portions of the population may be disgruntled because an eye for an eye, but they don't realize executing a man for planning to kill people does not promote the idea that killing is wrong.

[Food] Welcome to Eat Club

Nerdwife, celesathene, and I have started an 'Eat Club', where we cook dinner for each other once a week. Last night was my turn. The rules of Eat Club are:

1) No one talks about Eat Club
2) No one talks about Eat Club
3) If it is your first time, you have to cook
4) Everyone eats, no one quits

Anyways, on your night you choose what to make and are in charge of planning as well as preparation.

For my night, I choose to make beef and portabella skewers, here is my menu:

1st course: endive and mixed green salad w/ Ginger-Miso organic dressing, artfully arranged

Main course: beef skewers, portabella skewers, grilled portabella tops, chips-n-salsa

desert: strawberry shortcake, bosten cream cake

charcoal: natural hardwood chips

meat: locally raised, organic, grass-fed, free-range beef, pre-cut into large cubes

portabella tops: organic large portabellas (x5), 1 package of small-medium whole portabella

salad: 3 endives, leaves peeled and arraged at corners of square bowl, the cores chopped and mixed with a spring-mix of salad, sliced radishes, shaved carrots

skewer fixings (for both types): 2xlarge red peppers, sliced into squares, 1 large red onion (quartered, the layers are broken apart and used on the skewers), left over medium whole portabellas, 1 dozen small red potatoes cut in half. I arranged the skewers as followed:

===[potatoe half]=[red pepper slice]=[onion layer]=[beef cube/mushroom]=[mushroom/potate]=[red pepper slice]=[beef cube/mushroom]=[potatoe half]==>

Marinade:

I made the marinade in an amount large enough for both mushrooms and the beef.

1.25 cups balsamic vinegar
1 cup olive oil
2 cloves garlic minced
1 cup onion diced
4 branches of fresh rosemary (de-stemmed, just use the leaves)
enough shavings of fresh ginger to taste

mix the ingredients in a large bowl until the oil and vinegar are evenly mixed. Split amount in half and put into 1 gallon sealable freezer bags. Refridgerate overnight.

On the day of cooking, place the beef into one bag for at least 8 hours and put back into the refridgerator.

2.5 hours before cooking, remove bags from refridgerator. Add mushrooms to non-beef bag and let set for 1 hour. While waiting for marinade to work its magic, clean up the large portabella tops. Gill side up soak with olive oil, dash of balsamic vinegar, put on some fresh garlic, crushed red pepper (in my case it was cayanne) and let sit until ready to grill.

Assemble skewers and let cook on grill. When meat skewers are almost done add the mushroom skewers and portabella tops. Cook to taste.

I am not a cook and this was a great learning experience. I was far more capable than I thought. One of the main lessons learned was that I should have pre-cooked the small potatoes before putting them on the grill. They were quite underdone. In the future I would nuke the potatoes until they are half-done before putting them on the skewers.

Beer that was served: Bohemia (a nice ale from Mexico)

Wine served: Relax Riesling (white), Fezter Gewurstrimzer (sp?, white)

Coffee served with dinner: Illy espresso decaf for drip coffeemakers.

[Musings] Its 2am and I am awake redux

Again I find myself awake at 02:00. This time I am channelling my restlessness into getting the new version of JET (Jumpstart Enterprise Toolkit) working and finishing the initial base install flash archive of Solaris 10 1/06, which will be the first Solaris 10 via jumpstart image my workplace will have. It has been a good learning experience. I have learned a lot about JET and about Solaris 10. I had to do a bit of post-install scripting to get a few bugs fixed. JET has this nasty habit of not genning SSH keys for some reason and that means when it is done with the install sshd won't start and instead will go into a maintenance mode. 'svcs -x' does not give any really useful information. Doing a bit of digging I found that sshd will not start unless host keys are present (duh), after confirming that /etc/ssh did not contain any keys I whipped up a quick script that genned the SSH keys (DSA only) as well as performing some other configuration (enabling NTP, hardening inetd, disabling print services (we use LPRng), adding HDS support to mpxio, adding a smarthost to sendmail, etc.). I then create a flash archive once I was satisfied that the OS is configured to a base minimal level. This archive will be the 'golden image' upon which further customizations will be made until a working production archive image is done. The next step is to add the freeware and utilities that we need to the image (such as LPRng, emacs, nano, gtar, gcc, binutils, /usr/local/perl, etc.). Once these final customizations are made we will have a working production install image. We are also planning on purchasing some of the new SUN T2000 servers, which are nice, energy efficent, 1U machines that contain the new Niagra chip, which is a single processor with 8 cores, which can service up to 32 threads at once. It is a great app box for things like LDAP, web server, database (like Oracle) and anything that is not floating point computationally intensive as the proc only has a single FPU for 8 cores. The bus is also PCI-E and screams. We have a loaner system that we are going to install a 10Gb ethernet card into and see if we can get above the theoretical maximum of 2.8Gb that we are seeing on systems with PCI-X and 66MHz bus speeds, we will see however as the 10Gb cards we have are PCI-X. Anyway I digress, I mentioned the T2000 as once I have flars built, I will have to build special onces for the T2000s as the new chip technology is different from the 'sun4u' architecture of the other systems, it is 'sun4v' and flash archives must be built to specific target architecture, and currenlty 'sun4v' is only supported on Solaris 10.

Why am I awake? Various reasons. A lot has been pressing on my mind. I am having difficulty balancing work/home/social. A lot to do/I want to do, not enough time. The old story. This job has forced me to be far more social than I am used to and I am a very private person. Adjusting is hard, even after a year. This summer is shaping up to be busy, like last summer was, but the difference is that it is filled with a variety of things I want to do as opposed to a summer of things I had to do (i.e. work on that damn house in the Cities).

I purchased a new (used) bicycle from the local bike shop (Bicycle Sports). It is a Bianchi and I love it. I have only had it for two weeks and have put close to 60 miles on it. This last week has been dismal and rainy, so I have been grounded, which has sucked. This bicycle offers me more than activity and exercise, both of which I need, it also gives me freedom. When I get on the bike and start riding I am transported back in time to when I was 10 years old tooling around on my bike. Carefree, happy, exhilerated.

Ah well enough rambling, back to my flash archive test install, SSH is not starting post install using flash install (as opposed to jumpstart), eventhough I have a script in place to gen new SSH keys, back to debugging, at least in a pinch we can jumpstart a system.

[Activism] I re-iterate my boycott against Target

Alternet.org has an article here paralleling the similarities between Target and Wal-Mart. In short it is a big box store that has a deliterious affect on towns and community, as well as having a Pharmacy policy that puts the Pharmacists beliefs over customer needs.

from the artice:

In contrast to this image, however, critics say that in terms of wages and benefits, working conditions, sweatshop-style foreign suppliers, and effects on local retail communities, big box Target stores are very much like Wal-Mart, just in a prettier package.

Of more than 1,400 Target stores employing more than 300,000 people nationwide, not one has a union. Employees at various stores say an anti-union message and video is part of the new-employee orientation.

We have been boycotting Target and Wal-Mart and have been able to source 99% of our needs from other more local/regional and progressive sources, and this is in Rochester, a small city of only 85,000. I realize in the south (Arkansas in particular) as well as some rural areas, you have no option but to go to Wal-Mart or else travel 30-40 miles to get your needed goods. In that case, all I can say is that you can fill out customer surveys asking that Wal-Mart treat their employees better, amend their Pharmacy policy, and stop doing evil.

[Regret] Mom I am a terrible son

Mom,

I don't know if you will read this before I talk to you but I am sorry. Sorry for being a terrible son. I forgot your birthday for the third year in a row. Its not like I don't have my life in order, I have no excuse. I am sorry.

Happy birthday, very belated. I still love you, I am just absent minded.

Your son

PS Becuase I will probably miss Mother's Day, Happy Mother's Day in advance and sorry for not having sent a Christmas gift.

[World] May Day

Happy May Day! Workers of the world be celebrated!