Category Archives: Thoughts

It’s only money, right?

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I’ve been contemplating a new car for a few months as my current 1998 Toyota Corolla is quickly approaching 200,000 miles and while it is running just fine, part of me is concerned that my 500-mile-a-week commute may be asking for trouble. Normally, I drive a car until it stops working and then replace it but depending on the nature of a major failure, it might be more of a safety issue than that of convenience.

While I continued to debate that internally, I decided that we should at least be familiar with the available options in the case a purchase needs to be made without the gift of deliberation and research.

With that in mind, we decided to take advantage of the kids staying the night at Becky’s mother’s house and go looking at cars. I figured the short list due to experience and reputation was the Toyota Yaris or another Corolla, the Honda Civic, and for comparison, the Ford Focus.

We visited Toyota and Ford on Saturday and to varying degrees got the sterotypical car salesman treatment. The Yaris is quite a nice car, but as is expected, is an example of minimalist design and engineering. I have modest needs and requirements so was satisfied but not overly enchanted. The Focus made no real impression over the Yaris and the sales staff was quite annoying.

Sunday, we hit the local Honda dealer and looked at the 2006 Civic and took a quick test drive. Unlike our experience at the other dealers, the salesman was quite low key and caused us to feel no pressure. The way it came accross, he figured that if we were going to buy then good, but if not, nothing he could do would change that.

We looked and did see one that we would have gotten, but I still couldn’t get around the fact my Corolla was still working fine. If we get it now, then it will sure to be paid off when we need to replace the CR-V and if it is kept in good shape, should work out just nicely to be used as my daughter’s first car when she turns 16 in 7 years. Pro and con, pro and con.

After a few minutes, I finally decided that I could easly spend weeks and months deliberating and debating. Why bother?

My new black 2006 Civic is in the garage.

Can’t wait to get home

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While attending WWDC has been fun and educational this week, I am certainly ready to get home.

Last night, I was able to spend time with my old friend Cary, who works for Apple, at the beer bash at the Apple campus. That was fun, I got a small tour of his building and his office. He has seven computers crammed in there, but somehow, it works.

Of course, with the current raised travel threat level the flight home may be fun. I’m going to check one of my bags (I normally try to do carry-on only) to make sure I can get everything home. I also decided to move my reservation to one that leaves 45 minutes later to make sure that any delays getting through security don’t cost me my flight home.

Well, that was a stupid move

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While killing some time between sessions at WWDC, I saw that my mother-in-law was online so I thought “Hey! what a good time to back up her data.” So took but a moment to start a rsync backup that I do of her user directory on her machine to my system at home. To keep things from getting out-of-hand with regards to space, I use the –delete option which removes any files not in the source directory.

Like all mistakes, they happen because you don’t pay attention and that is exactly what happened to me. I was in the wrong destination directory and was syncing the files to ‘.’ (the current directory) so it happily started deleting files that weren’t in the source. Unfortunately, I was in my home directory at the time. Once I realized, my mistake, I stopped it but not before it had deleted my mail repository, my website, and my blog (this one).

Fortunately, regardless of my horribly rookie mistake, I also back up my user directory two different ways every day. A few restores later and I had all but a few hours of email restored and the entire website and blog.

Good for me, I guess, but it shouldn’t have happened in the first place. Lesson learned, use explicit paths.

Virtualization firm Parallels updates software (my first Digg sumission)

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This is really no big deal, but I just submitted my first Digg story. It was no big deal, just an article on CNET regarding a new beta of Parallels‘ Virtual Workstation for OS X (a very good product which I’ve blogged about before).

At the bottom of the artical was a "Digg this" link which I did and it turns out it hadn’t been submitted yet. I revised the provided text a bit and clicked submit.

Does that make me cool? Probably not.

read more | digg story

O.K. is it just me or does Steve Jobs not look good?

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Yeah, yeah another WWDC post, but the truth is, I’m stuck in a hotel room alone all week so I get to catch up with my posting backlog. While watching this morning’s keynote I couldn’t help thinking that Steve Jobs was looking really thin. Sure, I was at the back of the rather large auditorium and he was just a speck from my naked eye, but there were two large projections over the middle of the crowd and he looked and acted off-the-mark. Having seen dozens of keynotes over the years, I also noticed that he
deferred to other presenters far more often (and for longer) then
anytime I can remember.

Two years ago, Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer which was was caught early and removed with surgery and fortunately, he did not require either chemotherapy or radiation therapy. Technically, he should be in good shape. Maybe, he’s not? Perhapse there is nothing new here and it just looked funny on screen but I hope and pray that his health is good.

Did you see the keynote? Watch the first few minutes and tell me what you think?

This is work, right?

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I’ve been a Mac user since 1985 and have been in IT for about 14 years professionally. This week, I have the opporunity to attend Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco. While its primary audience is OS X developers, there is a fairly substantial IT track of sessions for the week covering all sorts of client, server, and storage needs. Among my many other responsibilites at work, I also am responsible for the OS X infrastructure, gathering the 150 or so OS X workstations in our campus into a managed group and attempt to provide the same enterprise-level management and support that is currently available with our Active Directory domain. As a result, many of the sessions are very apropos for our situation.

Additionally, we’re trying to get Apple hardware to a “first-class” status so that hardware can be purchased more easily. Not that it’s hard now. There is just some additional justification that you need to go through which could be avoided if it can be shown that Apple is indeed serious about the enterprise and is not just the consumer oriented “iPod company” that also makes other hardware. As an interesting aside, the IT department, which I am a member, is going to be getting quite a few MacBooks as they are just so gosh darn versitile for us geek-types. Mac OS and Unix all in one box and with the addition of Parallels (and soon VMware) Windows, Linux, or any other Intel OS is just too cool.

How much can a single click cost?

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My pride is hurt. Quite brused, in fact. You see, my family and I were headed over to a pool party/potluck for our church’s youth pastor who was leaving to work with The Navigators in Arizona. And I pressed the wrong button.

You’re probably confused. Perhaps I can explain. One of the features we really like about our house is the fact it has a rear detached garage and a driveway that goes down the side all the way to the street (like a good driveway should). Since we have dogs, we installed a gate shortly after we moved in at the end of 2001. Being practical and forward thinking, we realized that a manual gate while cheaper would get old really quick (e.g., pull up, get out, open the gate, pull through, get out, close the gate…) so decided to have it motorized. The installers did a really good job and even hooked up the mechanism to the middle button of our three buton garage door opener so that we didn’t have to worry about using two different remotes. Considering that two of the three buttons weren’t doing anything, it certainly made sense.

Flash forward to yesterday. I was pulling out of the garage having previously opened the gate and was backing down the driveway. Since I was clear of the garage I pressed the button to close the garage door. Moments later: **crunch** For a moment, I didn’t realize what happened and even when I got out and looked at the damage, I still wasn’t clear as how it happened. After I calmed down a moment, I realized that I must have hit the wrong button and the gate started closing right as I was approaching it.

It made contact exactly with the rear corner of the car at the edge of the gate. As a result, the turn signal/brake light was cracked, the rear bumber damaged, some small damage to the rear body, and 1 1/2″ steel frame along with two 5/8″ bars of the gate pushed in about a foot. To be honest, I probably couldn’t have done better if I tried.

The long and short is that only bad drivers that don’t pay attention have accidents like that. Me? I’m a good drive who considers himself quite careful and safe and would never have thought I would ever have an accident like that (by my hand at least).

We’re working on getting estimates for the car and gate. I’ll be lucky if I get off for less than $2000 for the both. We’ll see.

As a result, I’ve changed my driveway protocol. Open the door and gate, back out, stop, close the door and gate while stationary, and when completely closed, continue.

A meeting is good, but at what cost?

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I had the occasion to make a business trip yesterday at the last minute. I don’t mind so much and, in fact, kinda like traveling. Becky, on the otherhand, is less comfortable with last minute changes so wasn’t overly enthusiastic. Oh, wait, did I mention changes? Well, you see, I was travelling with my manager and we had the same outgoing flight from San Diego at 7:14 AM. Unfortunately, it was cancelled along with another from the same airline headed to Chicago. Needless to say, there were quite a few people trying to find alternatives and after almost two hours of standing in line, I was able to get a seat on a later flight. My boss wasn’t as lucky and ended up buying a ticket on another airline to Oakland (I was flying into SFO).

The meeting happened and my boss and I were only about 60 and 30 minutes late, respectively.

That afternoon, we headed back to the airport to take the original return flight home only to find that the 6:32 PM flight was now leaving at 9:00. We tried briefly to get switched to an 8:00 flight, but didn’t want to stand in any more lines for only a one hour gain.

We boarded at 8:30 in advance of the pilots who arrived just before 9:00 (they were coming in from another airport). The plane took off about 9:30, landed at 11:00 and then I had to drive home.

From home back to home was 19 hours. All for a four hour meeting. Ugh.

Sometimes, it’s fun being a tourist

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Becky and I went away this past weekend though we didn’t go far. Like our last trip which was in our old haunts of Cardiff-by-the-Sea, we decided to stay in downtown San Diego. Specifically, The Westgate Hotel.

Not only did we stay in a hotel in a town we’ve effectively lived in our whole lives, we then proceded to do many of the standard “touristy” things common for the area:

  • We went to Historic Old Town
  • We walked around Horton Plaza
  • We had drinks at the Beach bar at the W Hotel (interesting, but the hotel is pretty pretentious)
  • Walked on the beach (Silver Strand)
  • Saw Amadeus at the Lamb’s Players Theatre in Coronado (really well done and David Cochran Heath gave a stellar performance as Salieri)
  • Had breakfast at The Living Room (SDSU location)
  • Walked around Belmont Park and had lunch at Canes
  • Went to a house party hosted by my manager
  • Enjoyed a pedicab trour of downtown
  • Walked on the beach (Cardiff-by-the-Sea)
  • Had lunch at our favorite Mexican restauraunt

It really was an enjoyable time and the best part, of course, was that I spent it with my wife.

Man, that was a “toot!”

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My kids gave me a really fun father’s day present that I was able to collect on this past Saturday. I’ve always been a fan of railroads. My grandfather was a conductor on the Denver & Rio Grand Western Railroad and like most kids, I was fortunate enough to have  a model railroad that I developed with my father.

Well, Saturday, I was able to take control of the OERM 1956 at the Orange Empire Railway Museum and their "Run One" program. It puts you in control of a locomotive by your own hands. After about 2 minutes of instruction of the rather basic controls, the instructor sat me down and said "Go."

I had about a mile worth of rail in a straight line. I spent next next hour going forward and back and trying to do so in relatively graceful manor (or at least as graceful a 115 ton engine can be). My kids started getting bored pretty quickly which wasn’t helped by the increasing tempuratures (it was 85 when we arrived and 102 when we left two hours later). I tried to engage them by letting them control the throttle or switching the engine from forward to reverse. That helped a bit. To be honest, I think the idea of controlling something that large is mostly lost on children especially since the concept of trains and their historical significance is all but uncomprehensible for them these days of overnight shipping and easy cross-content air travel.

It really was a blast and if you ever enjoyed building and running a model train, I believe you would enjoy it as well. My only complaint was that it didn’t include tasks like hooking up cars or dealing with switches. All-in-all, it will be something I’ll long remember.