Quick one today… watching Entourage and it’s interesting watching Turtle pull strings. Strings that he’s not used to pulling.
Interesting seeing him step up to to something that he’s not used to.
Pulling strings
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Monthly Archives: August 2010
Who do you think you are?
We had to deal with an incident recently… the notion of stereotypes and how they really don’t provide a rich picture of who you are.
Someone’s friend was wondering about us and the motorcycles. “Do they have tattoos? I didn’t think they hung out with those type of people.”
WTF?
No, we don’t have tattoos. No, we don’t go around in gangs. No, we’re not smuggling drugs. Just because someone is too shallow to even try to look at me and En to see who we are. Yes we have motorcycles, but we’re not who you think we are.
If you can’t be bothered to figure is out isn’t my worry — it’s the observer’s fault. The fact they limit who they associate with only makes them poorer as humans because they don’t permit themselves to have the freedom to think freely.
The underlying sentiment is really: “They aren’t behaving like I think they should. Who do they think they are anyway?”
The way of making everything black and white, then bucketing people by how they need to get sorted. Once you have them in a bucket then you can’t ever take them out since then you’d be wrong.
A different friend of a friend moved up here from West Virginia. She was the first in her family to get a real education and make something of herself. When she goes back home she gets shunned by a bunch of people: “she think’s she’s better than us.”
No.
You see this happening right now on a much larger scale too. Some terrorists are Muslims, therefore all Muslims are terrorists. The logic is watertight, right? But the oversimplification of the problem gets the wrong people in the wrong buckets. And once you’ve said it, you can’t go back since that would be waffling and showing that you can be wrong.
How do you fix it? I don’t know. I wish I did.
All I can say if you limit yourself to people just like you, you cut yourself off from the rich tapestry of this world; you’ll live in a very monochromatic world. Black and white that you created all by yourself.
“If you don’t want to wreck it, don’t race it”
I was watching a race recap of the ALMS race that happened at Mid-Ohio around a month ago. It was a good race.
Some of the little back-stories turned out interesting. The one that struck me was the interview with Greg Pickett from the Muscle Milk squad that races the Porsche RS Spyder. He managed to write off the chasis during practice. (Well, it might be reparable, but it took them out of the race weekend)
The interview was asking Greg how he’s going to sit back in a race car to drive in anger again. He went on to say it was some freak mechanical problem that was a one in a million type of event — all you have to justify to yourself that it it won’t happen again in the same way.
He went on to say that “if you don’t want to wreck it, don’t race it.”
In many ways that’s the same way I feel about most of life. Maybe wrecking is a bit much, but it speaks to the risks that you need to take in life.
Everything in life in a risk. Some more obvious than others.
Racing at 120 mph is obvious that you are taking a risk. Gambling at Vegas can lose you money.
Doing anything at all “odd” has the chance that something strange might happen. Otherwise everyone would be doing it.
This is why I’m not salty about Labrador. I took a risk. It didn’t pan out this time. But I got away with it for the most part.
Motorcycle ramble + Lupita’s Mexican Restaurant in Oberlin, OH
Some something quick and random for today…
It was a beautiful day and summer is unfortunately coming to a close soon… En suggested taking the bike out to get dinner somewhere not close by. I picked “west.”
Our initial destination was a a Mexican joint in Grafton. Upon getting there it seemed closed. The open sign was on but it seemed like no one was home. It was creepy. The rest of the town seemed to be the same way: mostly deserted. It’s sad seeing a town that’s dying.
But we were starting to get hungry so we told the Zumo to search out some other Mexican place nearby. Up came Lupitas in Oberlin just a few more miles up the road.
This was a damn good place. Some of the best Mexican food I’ve had anywhere! My standard order at nearly any Mexican joint is the same: beef taco, chicken enchilada and a tamale. This covers the gamut of different types of food, from crunchy to saucy and everything in between. Add rice and beans and you got yourself enough to take home.
The food was very well seasoned and had a lot more complexity than I find typical in most Mexican places. The normal taco meat is a fried ground beef with some chili seasoning. This was a lot more with a far deeper set of spice notes — I think I might’ve even tasted a hint of cinnamon. All that in a shell that I think was freshly made. The enchilada and tamale were similarly good with a smoky sauce on top.
I highly recommend it if you’re nearby — or even not so nearby! Yummy!
A little walk around the campus followed up dinner and let things settle a bit before coming back home. Now I have to find out a bit more about the Boxer Rebellion since they had a big memorial for some missionaries that were killed in it. I remember hearing about it in seventh or eight grade, but I’ve long since forgotten it unfortunately.
BTW:
Lupitas
84 South Main Street
Oberlin, OH 44074-1646
(440) 774-7080
View Vec Blog – Food in a larger map
Vacation needs
In 2008 and 2009 I went on some fairly epic motorcycle trips. I would consider neither of them awesome successes. That being said I wouldn’t trade either for anything.
The first one was trying to make it up to the Arctic Ocean in Alaska. A bent wheel and an absurd schedule we set for ourselves made it an impossible goal. We bent the front wheel of the bike just a few km south of the Yukon border on route 37. We made it as far as Whitehorse in the Yukon before turning back and riding back on the ALCAN with front end bouncing the whole way home.
Last year’s trip to Labrador ended worse: with the bike in a ditch after a bad tank slapper. This time around I was going it alone. While the trip ended quite badly, I saw so much that I can’t even express it in words.
This year before the acquisition we took a trip down into the Smoky Mountains following the Blue Ridge Parkway. This one, thankfully, did not end badly and everything we left with came back in one piece unbent.
The transaction happened and I wound up forfeiting around 190 hours or so of vacation time. That’s time I can’t get back. The lesson I learned is don’t bank so much. You might get to use it. One of the sayings in the Church of the Subgenius is “the world ends tomorrow: you might die.” I didn’t take that heart enough. Few people complain about not working enough. With the new position I’m starting back at square zero.
Mix in the talk of relocation and uncertainty and it started to wear on me. I need a vacation. But 5 hours in the bank does not a vacation make. At this point I’m just looking to the future. By next year if I’m frugal with my time off I should be up a full two weeks.
Next year I will reattempt one of the trips! It gives me something to look forward to!
If I’m still out East: Labrador! better prepared this time though. The addition of the steering damper and more off-road experience should solve my off-road problem. Maybe this time I can go clockwise instead of counterclockwise.
If I’m in the West: Alaska! Ok, well I won’t be able to go all the way up to the Arctic Ocean in two weeks (and get back in time) but it’ll let us spend some more time in the places we wanted to last time anyway!
Something to look forward to makes all the difference in the world.
Rant: Bathroom etiquette
Simple thing today: bathrooms.
I know everyone’s heard of the urinal protocol and what order one uses them. Even XKCD had a writeup on it.
I’m interested in something else. I’m sure women have the same issue.
Two things:
- When you are done: flush
- Before you leave: wash your hands
Is that so hard?
I find few things worse than walking up to a yellow urinal. Why? It’s simple to fix.
Worse still is when you know who violates these rules.
And you have to work with them.
Ewww.
Whad’ya mean I have a gigabit switch on the floor?
I think I hit the limit.
While searching for some spare memory for my sister-in-law’s laptop I found something. Actually a bunch of somethings.
Take a step back. The fact I’m looking for spare memory — that might be a tip-off. That I might have some spare memory laying about. And that I have to search for it.
Then the kicker. I find a gigabit switch on the floor. This is the third gigabit switch in the house. I knew of two of them, but now I have this extra one? What gives? Am I getting all Alzheimer-y?
At least I labeled both it and it’s power supply.
!
Really?
I guess I’m both organized and dumb at the same time.
Maybe I should finally clean out my office. Once I get past the three perfectly working keyboards. And around four CD and/or DVD players/writers. And a couple routers. And an ISDN modem. And a 56K CSU/DSU. (!)
No I won’t post pictures. It might make you faint.
Really.
Now I just have to figure out what to do with half a dozen old motherboards. Anyone want any? Tons of memory to go with ‘em too. (By tons I mean quantity of sticks, not quantity of bits)
Free to a good home if you pick ‘em up. (Or it might give me an excuse to meet you half-way somewhere interesting.) If you want to bring beer that’d be cool too.
That being said, I think I’ll keep the switch.
But does anyone want some blank CDs? I think I have around 200 I might never finish using in my lifetime.
Ok. I really don’t have any excuse any more.
PowerBook G4 Hard Drive Replacement
My sister-in-law has a Mac (ok, an old Mac) with a hard drive that has long since died. The 80 GB drive ceased to be.
If you look at the ifixit replacement guide you might think it’s almost impossible to do it. You’d be wrong.
Total time spent replacing it: around 15 minutes.
The key is making sure you don’t mix up all the tiny screws:
My trick: put them on a piece of paper (don’t bump it after you set things up!!) and label each set as you take them out. If you go from left to right and top to bottom it’s easy to work backwards!
Random computer pr0n:
Unlike the instructions, this one didn’t have the little latch you need to open with a paper clip. No loss on my part though. It came apart and went back together easy as can be.
Now I’m installing the OS and it all still seems to work.
The 95% solution in action
I just recently started with a new employer and have to choose my benefits – healthcare and so forth.
This is a normal event for most people. And most systems are built to handle this scenario just fine.
The company has also just announced that the benefits provider is changing. Again, this is a common enough event that systems should handle this without complaining.
But then you mix the two. Before my original selections are processed I need to change my elections because they’ve already changed. This is something that broke ADP’s system.
I can look at this from two different points of view. 1) They should make the system smarter. 2) The system just needs to handle the common cases and delegate to people when things get out of hand.
At Insurance.com we would always pick #1. The problem with is the number of cases you need to deal with skyrockets. And every case can interact with every other case. The coding is nearly insurmountable. The testing is even worse. You can build a system that you think works, but you have no way of proving that it’s working. You can do TDD to your heart’s content, but you can never account for all of the business rules and the interactions. (Ok, I guess you probably can, but never on time)
Option #2 seems like a cop-out. And it is. But it’s a safe cop-out.
Trisha has to spend a little bit of time on me and some other folks and manually set things up. Then it’s working. And we’re all happy.
How is that more efficient? Well, for one instead of spending weeks dealing with one set of business rules to figure out all permutations the system just punts. The empowered business owner, can make a game-time decision to set up things the way they should. She knows everything (more than a programmer can ever hope to know about a specific situation) and doesn’t have to ponder every possible set of cases — just my case. She decides, and it’s done.
The problem with #1 is that even if you nail all the rules, they keep changing and evolving. As things get even more complex (systems rarely get simpler over time) the possible interactions keeps exponentially going up. The rate of change commensurately keeps going down.
People are better at dealing with these poorly defined things than a program. People can make a snap decision, programs have to try to meet a deployment schedule.
Sometimes being in the middle of it can be frustrating. It can take longer and you wonder why the person designing it messed up and didn’t handle your case. But sometimes it pays just to have the smarts of a real-life person at the wheel.
Simple repetitive things are for computers to solve. For complex one-offs, I like to trust a person.
She’s on top of things though. In the end I know my benefits are set up right because a person made sure they were.
My first Apple problem
Last night my MacBook Pro developed a problem: I’m guessing a slightly jacked up filesystem.
The symptoms were a general slowness and the dreaded progress-bar on boot that indicates an fsck is taking place. The fact that it took place on two consecutive boots indicated something was really amiss. The install from Apple came as a non-journaled FS, which I think might be the root cause.
Today consisted of doing a clean format and reinstall of the OS.
Am I upset?
Not so much.
Why?
This is the same install I was on for two years without any problems at all. I’ve never had a Windows machine last that long. (Keep in mind I do more than surf — this is a development machine)
It does makes me a touch frustrated though.
But it’s all good now.
I took this chance to rebuild a new Win7 VM as well. Might as well I suppose.