Advogato blog for wetdog

5 Dec 2000

Tue, 5 Dec 2000 04:14:29 GMT

Chew on this:

We live in the Information Age; it's been dubbed that for years, and most of the people in this country readily accept it. But I don't think that's where our focus really lies.

By calling the current era the "Information Age," it implies that our focus is on the information. Having a wealth of knowledge at our fingertips, available any time with our always-on connections, it certainly would seem that way. We can find out nearly anything we desire in a few moments with references on the web, via e-mail, or any other fast means of communication.

But that isn't really what we care about; we don't use that information yet. We're more concerned about *having* it than *using* it. The method of transport is the primary focus: how the information gets from point A to point B, or more importantly, how fast it gets there. We're all obsessed with increased bandwidth, speedier processors, and how many frames per second our 3D video cards can crank out while looking at a pretty 2D web page. If a breakthrough in medical science occurs, do we need to start reading the 600 page white paper as it streams over our connections, or is the same information just as valuable and valid if we wait two days for the snail mail arrive?

Make no mistake about it: we live in the Communication Age. The Information Age will arrive directly after.

Anyone have comments?

1 Nov 2000

Wed, 1 Nov 2000 22:42:33 GMT

Hey, look at that! I finally made it to the apprentice level. How spiffy.

Been doing a bit more with PlanetWetDog lately. It's almost complete. Gotta do some touching up of the borders, put in a few more comments, and then I think I'll release it on OSWD.

Went to a Johnny Socko! concert at Rhino's last night. Played a good set. It was a 10th Birthday show. At least next year I'll be able to see them at the bar instead of being surrounded by a herd of high schoolers who think that putting on a stolen Coca-Cola T-shirt counts as a Halloween costume.

19 Oct 2000

Thu, 19 Oct 2000 03:58:52 GMT

I've been messin' around with the website some today. If you go there you won't see anything, cause I'm waitin' 'till it's all done. I'm really in need of content; the design part is easy. If you can think of something interesting that I should put on my website, e-mail me.

For eknuth's benefit: I have been sorting through Saigon.pm. Matter of fact, I've made a few changes, but not enough yet to be a substantial thing to show you.

I'm also working on a couple of things like wgrp, a perl program based on the w command that lets you specify a specific group or gid of people. I'm doing this to solve a problem I have at work: I want to know what employee's are logged in without sorting through regular users. So if I do

wgrp staff

I would get all employees because we're all in the staff group. Or

wgrp techsup

would just show my department. Does anyone else have the same problem, and therefore this might be a useful little utility?

I just solved my route table problem too. Damn thing's been screwed up for a week and the solution just dawned on me. "gw".

I haven't had any luck installing RH 6.2 on a 486 SCSI system. As soon as I get through changing the partitions, it burps a Sig11 and exits. Any ideas?

10 Oct 2000

Tue, 10 Oct 2000 20:16:07 GMT

I finally have a real project to work on. eknuth asked me to help him with a program called Saigon. It's basis is interacting with cable modems using SNMP. It looks big and scary, but I'll be able to figure it out in time. I'm looking foward to digging into the ol' Perl books and figure out what's going on. From what he explained, our first main goals are to make the program more modularized and cut down on the code size, document the heck out of it, and make it generic so we can more easily share it with others. If we make quick progress on it, you can [hopefully] look foward to an open-sourced version soon, but you didn't hear that from me...

3 Oct 2000

Tue, 3 Oct 2000 20:47:22 GMT

My manager had a bonfire/party last Friday. It was prompted by one of our supervisors leaving (Good luck Drew!) as well as a few others. Damn those were some good chicken wings.

And now we all know what a scrotum cozy is...

I just updated my notes at the top, and posted my TicTacToe there. Yeah, it's not much, but it was a fun leap into learning Perl. I think I'm going to start working on a real project now, or maybe jump in on a couple that are going on here. I've got some extra time...

24 Sep 2000

Sun, 24 Sep 2000 04:14:18 GMT

Threw a little food party this evening. Everything went quite well, and was very pleasant. I cooked up some beef stroganof and coush-coush, and baked a couple of pies. It's nice to have a little break like that every now and then.

The job has been up and down lately. I recently took a supervisor job of Kiva's technical support department. The pro's consist of being involved in elevated projects, in charge of training new employees, more exposure to the rest of the people in the company, and coworkers coming to me for questions. The downfalls are pretty substantial, though. I find I'm involved in the beurocracy way too much now, where as before I was sheilded from it. I think jlf says it best: "I want to get shit done at work with as little bullshit as possible." How right you are.

I thought about picking up another tech job that I can do in the evenings. Since I'm working days now at the supervisor, I have a lot of spare time that I could be using for useful things, like cleaning my house. But I don't want to. For some random, odd reason I'm only motivated at work. But I figure, "Hey, might as well make a little more money instead of sitting on my ass all night."

I don't think I would even bother if I had a shot at a sys job at Kiva in the near future, but with cdent leaving, they don't have time to spare for training someone. At least that's my inference of the official word I was given. Time will tell.

21 Sep 2000

Thu, 21 Sep 2000 15:40:32 GMT

Last night was one of my first true all night coding sessions. I was relatively pleased with my progress. I was able to implement some argument passing, which wasn't nearly as hard as I remembered from C++.

I've been brainstorming some ideas for DHCPReg as well. I looked over some of that last night (thanks for posting it Suso!) and have a couple of things I think I'll suggest, just as soon as I figure out how to put 'em in with the least amount of trouble. This could be my first contribution to free software! Maybe that'll help me get my foot in the door. :)

18 Sep 2000

Mon, 18 Sep 2000 20:53:58 GMT

I'm often amazed at how much you can learn about a person by studying them in different environments. I'm used to seeing most of my coworkers in the office environment, and that makes them seem very one-dimentional. Then I get to see them in stress-free surroundings, where they can actually be themselves, and they are nothing like I've come to know them in a year.

But then again, I'm often amazed that my dog still craps on the floor. Maybe I'm just over analyzing...