Following Edge

[Something rubs me the wrong way here... what is it? If I told you this was taken from a real magazine, would you say this is a current magazine? Would it be successful today? Please leave a comment with your observations.]

Business Management magazine brings businessmen respected advice, valuable references, and insightful features so your business can succeed.

From the cover of our September issue:

Business Management
[what really matters to businessmen] September Issue

• The 7 secrets of focused businessmen (They'll really help!)
• How to prevent the next audit error
• Employee Perks? Write-ups? (Strategies that work on wives too)

Inside our September issue:

• The real businessman's guide to employees and filing
• The hidden hazards in business: One businessman's story

Two free gifts are available for the enjoyment of businessmen who subscribe to Business Management magazine.

Yesterday, it dawned on me that I forgot to mention in my previous entry how unhappy I am with the poor attention the health care crisis has gotten from the current administration. Then, as if by cue, I got notice from my employer today that there must be more increases in our personal expenses (to the tune of at least $350 a year) to allow the company to afford to provide a once-again-reduced level of health insurance coverage. I hope that all of our employees will be able to afford the increase, but I fear we'll start to contribute to the pool of uninsured that has built so dramatically in the last 3 years. I know the company is doing its best to soften this blow, but it's going to hurt.

Do you remember all the work that Bill Clinton (and Hillary Clinton) did during him term as President to try and get legislation through the Republican Congress to nip this problem in the bud? There was a significant effort. I have not heard anything about health care reform form the Bush administration except for this silly Medicare Prescription Drug card that seems more borne out of politicians trying to sell their reelection than about solving the bigger problem with malpractice insurance, drug companies and health insurance.

I'll get back to cute pictures or technical gripes for my next entry. I just couldn't avoid pointing out this additional gripe with Bush given today's bad news.

Betsy at My Whim Is Law wrote last week about how antiquated and useless her experience on the phone bank for the Kerry campaign in Portland seemed (more than once). This directly mirrored my recent experience working the phone bank for the Kerry campaign in Eugene. Betsy hit some of my concerns except that my main concern is how dramatically little the effort accomplishes for the amount of volunteer time used and the number of people bothered by the calls.

Now, I have long been a rabid Independent voting only for the Democrats when they are really making sense. Abysmal funding for public services around here including schools, continued unemployment problems in our community and threats of our almost-retired farrier being called up for service in Iraq where Oregonians are dying in increasing numbers have all brought my to support Kerry as a better alternative. I am so concerned about the upcoming election that I "held my nose" and volunteered with the Kerry campaign. After my third offer to volunteer, they had me in to work the phone bank.

I didn't hold on to the detailed records that Betsy did, but the basic idea was to call registered voters and determine whether they were pro-Bush, pro-Kerry or undecided with the goal of focusing on the undecided voters since the Bush and Kerry voters don't seem likely to be switching. Well, after a couple of hours and about 100 calls, I had interrupted dozens of people in rural Oregon in the middle of their day and identified only 1 voter that was not firmly decided. For me, the cost far outweighs the result, but the Democrats don't seem to care.

Anne Marie, of course, says "Well, what do you think they should do instead"? Am I supposed to know? I don't ask them to write high-performance, secure RSA centralized authentication software and don't expect that I should have good ideas about political campaigns. There has to be a better way to use the teeming volunteers for the Kerry campaign than initially ignoring them then irritating them with ineffective work that annoys almost everyone involved.

Oh well, I'm sure they'll get that straightened out in the ample time before the election.

Eugene Webloggers, meet your weblog comrades at the upcoming Eugene weblogger meetup. As an introverted skeptic and blog neophyte, I wouldn't want to wager on whether I'd definately be there, but circumstances have led to me to be the organizer, so I'll be there.

There? Where? I've suggested The Strand (Theo's Coffee, Cozmic Pizza, Indira's Internet Lounge) at 8th and Charnelton. It has the basics: coffee, beer, food, free internet, nearby parking, 3 blocks from the bus and plenty of space. Offer your opinion if you have an objection or different idea. What can I be thinking asking webloggers for opinions?

And when? The "official" Weblogger Meetup time is 7:00pm on the third Wednesday of the month. Since any day and time is likely to be inconvenient for someone, I thought it would be best to stick with the standard, except that I would like to start at 6:30pm for the selfish reason that I have to get back Elmira in time to get my daughter to bed. Offer your opinion if you have a different opinion. Opinions again?

I was surprised to find information about more than 50 Eugene-based weblogs. The majority of them are active with (relatively) recent updates. Eugene webloggers range from asocial high school student to community-building post-grads to radical seniors; from the expected techies to artists to touring hard-rockers; from politically rabid to opinionated to purposely apathetic. It should be easy to find both common ground and interesting diversity amongst this group.

Now, I realize that there are conceptual differences between weblogging and meeting up in person; comfort with one may not translate to the other. Even so, I think meeting your fellow Eugene webloggers is likely to be "low impact social aerobics" and is likely to be interesting at the least and possibly really informative and validating of our weblogging efforts. Whether you're a current, potential or past weblogger, or a weblog consumer interested in meeting the folks behind the words and pictures, I hope we'll see you at the upcoming meetup.

Visit the meetup.com Eugene Weblogger Meetup Group to RSVP for the event. RSVPing will really help me keep you up to date on this and future meetups.

Eugene Weblogger Meetup
Wednesday, October 20 6:30pm - 8ish
199 West 8th Ave (at Charnelton)

Please comment to register your opinion on the event, the place, the date and time, etc. You know how.

While I'm not a complete shut-in, I definitely shy away from social situations enough to unmistakably be an introvert. So how did I now end up being the organizer for a monthly social gathering that I would normally be shy about even attending? Groucho Marx's "I don't want to belong to any club that will have me as a member" comes to mind.

It all started with an email from WordPress (the folks that make the software that makes this blog happen) where they announced the formation of WordPress "meetup" groups around the world to encourage users to get together and talk about WordPress in specific and weblogging in general. I thought, "Hmm... Meet up? Maybe? I don't have much weblogging experience, maybe it would help me out". They provided a link to the Meetup.com site where I put in my contact info to be notified about upcoming events in the Eugene area. Now, you may say that this didn't seem to be introverted, but I can assure you that the motivation was purely pragmatic and not social on my part. I wanted to find out more about how people organize themselves for weblogging, since I sometimes find it to be a real effort.

A short time later, I got an email from Meetup.com indicating that there would now be a person selected for each local "meetup" group to make sure that the meeting location was available and that the information on Meetup.com had been properly updated. It asked anyone who could possible help by spending a few minutes on this administrative task to visit a web page. Now, we're talking about administrative and organizational stuff here which is right up my alley so I knew I could handle that, so I indicated I could do it with the presumption that someone more experienced would be chosen by Meetup or by the members of the group.

Weeks go by and I receive another email from Meetup.com informing me that I have been selected as the group's "organizer" because the one other member of the group did not volunteer or express an opinion. A day later, I was informed that the group's meetup for August had been automatically cancelled since no one RSVP'd for it. Now, if there's one thing worse than being an introvert and being named a group organizer, it's being the organizer of an unsuccessful meetup group that doesn't get around to meeting. I suppose many of my life's successes are from being unwilling to fail even if I'm the only one who will notice.

So, I looked around the Meetup site to see what could be done to actually organize a meetup. I was just starting to be unimpressed when I noticed a "you might be interested in..." link to the Eugene Weblogger Meetup group. This group had 9 members (huge compared to the WordPress group) and no one had volunteered to be its organizer, so I joined the group and Meetup selected me as the organizer for that group. I figured I could have better success with two blogging groups than with one and the effort would be the same. You see, the whole thing was a slippery slope.

The bad news: all of the members seemed to have been inactive since 2002 and the group did not appear to have actually met in recent history. This was confirmed when I visited the site of the meetup at the proper time and confirmed there were no webloggers there. Now, this was not looking like success for either group.

So, I set aside the Meetup site and used my usual research skills and Google and the ORBlogs.com site to see how many webloggers may actually be in Eugene. I was amazed to find over 50 Eugene weblogs, the majority of which were recently active. They spanned the entire map: techies, young bohemians, activists, ex-hippies, touring rockers and much, much more. This seemed like a community that would be interesting to meet and that would be interested in meeting each other.

Today, I'm actually taking on the mantle of organizer and have rescheduled the October meetup, posted an introduction, and am emailing the Eugene bloggers I found.

Wish me luck in this; both as an organizer and as a reluctant introvert.

No, I'm not up early today... I'm still up late last night. So many things are going on at work that my head was not filled tonight with restful dreams, but instead with thoughts of "UNIX system migrations", "Layer 2 private vs public VPN or managed public VPN technology", "Return address selection on automated mailers" and "SNMP router traffic graphing". Normally, I sleep quite well and don't let work invade where it doesn't belong, but tonight my head is full of:

dodIpOptSendRIP1 OBJECT-TYPE
 SYNTAX  INTEGER { enable(1), disable(2) }
 ACCESS  read-write
 STATUS  mandatory
 DESCRIPTION
        "Allows sending of RIP packets to this destination
        when connected and IP routing is enabled using RIP 1 only."
...
unless (exists($custinfo->{$data[0]})) {
	$custinfo->{$data[0]} = { applecare => 0, cpus => [] };
}
...
DS1/Frame   384 Kbps    $419.95     $799.00
IDSL    144 Kbps    $144.95     $599.00
...

So, I stopped tossing around in bed about 2:30 and have been doing research on these technical things for 4 hours. I'll probably get back to bed now, but since everyone starts getting up and making a ruckus by 7:30, I don't expect to be well rested for the coming day. Hopefully, my hours of work overnight will compensate for my stumbling inefficiency at work today.

I think the issue is simply that I have too many pending requests and active projects to fit them all into the proper spot in my consciousness. I'll have to get some of these things off my plate soon to return to my usual practice of good sleep at night.

Had to take a sick day today. Horrible burning in my chest and constant cough. Of course, I still checked my email and made a few calls to keep my work backlog from completely overwhelming me, but I also spent hours resting and eating chicken soup (thanks to Anne Marie). Lauren was sick too, starting last night, so Anne Marie kept her well tended and resting up this morning. However, even when sick, Lauren has a ton of energy, so she was soon more interested in playing than resting. So, Lauren and I compromised between her need to play with her train table and my need to rest in bed by moving the train table to the bed. See the pictures below.

Hopefully, full of cold medicine, we'll sleep well tonight and be ready for work and school in the morning. I'm not getting my hopes up, but a good night's sleep will probably improve my optomism.

Wit and wisdom will resume with improved health.

I'm working on ordering services for a new location for the company I work for, but it's hard sometimes to get all the information necessary to work with the beaurocracy of utility companies.

(This post has been briefly summarized for you due to possibly sensitive content.)

Our stereo has been broken for a month or more. When Lauren discovered that we couldn't play music, she first pointed to the knot of wires we all have behind out A/V equipment and suggested "I think the wires are tangled" and when I insisted that was not the issue, she offered "We should have someone fix it". While this is sage advice, it presented a problem.

You see, in order to occupy my mind while I was off work for 2 or 3 months after Lauren was born, I built and programmed a stereo/tv from PC parts, free software and Perl scripts. We called it PookCD after Lauren's nickname "PookieBoo". I had originally intended to use MP3 audio files as they were just becoming popular at that time (January 2001), but, even at the best quality, I could tell the difference between the CD and the MP3. Lots of good parts of the music were missing. So, I decided that the music would be stored in CD quality using a lossless compression.

The problem with lossless compression is that it requires a lot of space. I had to break the bank and buy two 60 gigabyte drives (high capacity at that time) in order to be able to hold 400 CDs. I couldn't afford to buy 4 drives in order to have a backup.

By the end of my paternity leave, I had built a very nice PookCD. When you put in a CD, the name of the artist and all the songs are displayed, you can play the CD if you like and in less time than it takes to play the first 5 songs, the entire CD is stored permanently. From that point on (even in the middle of playing the 5th song), you can take out the CD and it will continue playing. From then on, you can browse or find the CD's songs and play them along with the other stored music.

So, when the system failed with a broken power supply and a broken drive, I figured I should see if PookCD is outdated. Looking around on the Internet, I just don't see a solution that does all of these things in CD quality and also acts as a TV. There's lots of stuff for managing and playing MP3 files, but I'm not willing to lose that much quality. So, I decided to replace the broken parts (plus a backup drive soon since 120 gigabyte drives are now cheap) and continue with PookCD.

Now, since the drive failure lost half our CDs, I had to reload them. So (gratuitous pictures of our mini-farm for Ross and courtesy of my new camera):

I headed out to the barn, saying "Hi" to Snickers and Shadow along the way.
Headed upstairs to look over the new hay that was delivered this week and...
to search through the huge selection of technical junk in the barn for...
my boxes of original CDs. Yes, RIAA and other music pirate bashing thugs, I do have the originals for every CD from Aerosmith to OutKast and from James Taylor to Zelig.

So, wish me luck as I spent the next week or two sticking another of these CDs in the stereo each time I walk through the living room. At least, PookCD lives again!

Today certainly was my hay day (as opposed to heyday). As tons of hay burned near Salem, another ton of hay arrived to replenish our supplies, which I think we're going through too quickly to last though next spring. I wrote previously about my hope that we were fully stocked for the winter.

I was shocked and surprised to hear on the television news that there were 7,000 tons of hay ablaze
at a TIBA, Inc storage facility near Salem. That quantity is incredible and, evidently, untrue since other reports indicate 300 tons, which is a lot, but only 100 time what we store.

Hay is very flammable and it sounded from the recorded 911 call I heard that the owners knew the extent of the bad news shortly after it started. The caller reported "The hay storage is on fire. It's going to be burning for days", to which the 911 dispatcher fumbled, "Uh, what did you say"?

Here's hoping that spontaneous combustion steers clear of all of us for the rest of the year.

Given that tomorrow is Lauren's first full day at her first full school year (at the impressive sounding College Hill Montessori School), here are three amazing recent quotes from Lauren which we found amazing for a 3-year-old:

• "We need to cut 5 pieces" - five seconds before everyone else could count and agree that we had 5 people at our "un-birthday" party.
• "Daddy, on your next birthday, you'll be 24" - two hours after putting two full boxes of candles (24) on the "un-birthday" cake and a moment before I said "of course I will"!
• "Jesus... Jesus!" - two seconds after dropping something she was trying to hand to her babysitter and one second before I said "Lauren, watch your cursing"!

I'm anxiously awaiting my new digital camera (which the neophyte eBay seller has had trouble getting to me), so you may soon have to endure cute pictures of Lauren in addition to quotes. Not to mention pictures of everything else in sight.

Some people imagine that a computer nerd knows everything about computers, but there's actually a huge difference between a programming nerd and a graphics nerd. To such a degree that they can barely communicate.

I finished the programming for the new laser-printed charge account statements and I believe the code is perfect, but some artifacts remain (like "[::911]", which should be "behind the scenes") and half of the letters are missing from the text (customer name is "RE ISTER UAR", which is definately wrong). To this, I say, "Curse you, Nolan"! (in the nicest possible way, of course, since he is now closer to godliness that I could be). Nolan, who worked for me from 2000 to 2003, is a brilliant fellow, but is on the opposite end of the "form vs function" spectrum from myself and certainly a graphics nerd. He designed a beautiful template for the statement, but allowed kerning and font subsetting, which are great for graphic design, to totally ruin the document for automation.

Now, I have to find a way to use Adobe Illustrator to re-create the output. Of course, Illustrator is very expensive and I haven't the faintest clue how to use it. I would talk to the company's marketing department, but this communication gap would probably result in the same result that I got with Nolan.

Wish me luck.

Anne Marie and I took Lauren to the State Fair in Salem. We got to enjoy seeing the horses, pigs, goats, rabbits, cavies and a few chickens before enjoying the kind of meal you can only get at the fair: bad hamburgers, cold fries, corn on the cob, corn dogs, etc. The eats at the State Fair are not so much of a highlight as this once-a-year gut-turner ought to be since we eat the same once-a-year delights a month earlier at the Lane County Fair.

Just as we were heading off to ride the chair lift to the carnival rides area to indulge Lauren's need to ride "three or eight or ninety-eight" carnival rides, the rain started coming down in buckets. We did our best to be patient by viewing the complete selection (two floors) of 4H exhibits, but decided to throw in the towel as the grounds began to get a bit flooded.

Lauren was only somewhat disappointed since her yearlong goal of eating enough to be tall and to go on the "spinning bears" had been realized at the Lane County Fair. Plus, you know how we love the animals at the fair.

35 years ago, on September 2, 1969, BBN technicians installed and activated the first Internet site at UCLA. This first site for the experimental network (then called ARPANET) was run on SEX. Actually, SEX was the name of the operating system (Sigma EXperimental system) running on the SDS Sigma 7 computer that was the first site on the Internet, so it's not quite the same SEX that runs the Internet these days.

Many people will argue that the precursor to the Internet didn't really start until October 29, 1969, when the first site connected to the SEX machine at UCLA. Before you complain about connection delays on the Internet, remember that the Internet started with this 57 day delay for the first connection.

Nevertheless, 35 years ago, this was the diagram of ARPANET, the network that became the Internet:

Over the next 8 years the network expanded to a startling 111 computers!

Then the network became NSFNet, then the Internet. My opinion is that the Internet became well known in 1994. CSNW and I had already been on the network a short while by then, but everyone else joined us very quickly.

Looking back at the last 35 years, the amazing part is that the Internet grew rather slowly for 25 years and has dramatically exploded in the last 10 years. Now, according to Wired Magazine, it's no longer even the Internet, but just the internet.

So, take a moment today to join be in a toast to the internet: Happy 35th birthday!