Three times…

Posted on August 31, 2011 by George Burgyan

That’s the most number of times I will answer the same question in one day — hell a two hour span. I don’t care how you re-word it. I’m presently the one and only programmer at work. I have a list of stuff I need to do. Answering the same question over and over the same way isn’t a way of getting things moving along any faster.

Likewise, rewording a request to see if I’ll give you a different estimate for time isn’t going to work either. You can have things done right, or you can have things done fast. And getting it done fast often takes longer anyway.

Speed

Posted on August 30, 2011 by George Burgyan

There’s a right speed. Not too fast, not too slow.

What am I talking about? Business.

If you are overly cautious you’ll never get anything done. If you go too fast you’ll constantly fall over.

Like the old saying from martial arts, to go fast you must go slow. Slow doesn’t mean like molasses. Slow means deliberate. Slow means being able to think about what you are doing while you are doing it.

Merely trying to go fast just wears you out.

- = -

Ennie and I went for a bike ride tonight. I commented that she was pushing harder than she typically does. There were a few times I was lost in thought and I looked up and she was 20 feet ahead of me. I had to speed up again.

All the energy expended up front backfired when we got to the hill.

The hill is a challenging, but short, 13% grade pop up around 50-60 feet. It’s sprinting up a five-story building.

But if you run out of energy you walk up it instead of riding. It doesn’t matter why you ran out of energy — all that matters is you ran out.

- = -

A haiku:

Be deliberate.
Know where you should be going.
Figure out the win.

W8DFL QSL Cards – 8/29/2011

Posted on August 29, 2011 by George Burgyan

Welcome to the land of repeats… even with the extra one. Some get well soon cards (some of which are dupes themselves!)

Why this one? It’s the first reference to 6m that I’ve found. Though it’s not a completed card. I heard En tell stories about how her grandpa had a portable radio in the trunk of the car; I wonder if this is from that time?

I’m just pulling this one up since it’s from 1936. A giant 750w 160m amp in the middle. Wow!

This one is interesting. If you look to Vic’s station, this time he’s W8DFL/VE1. Apparently he took his rig up there to Nova Scotia and made some contacts back home! Sure is cheaper than long distance back then!

View photos at SmugMug

K8NUQ		USA	Cleveland, OH		Dec 11, 1960	10	AM	Hope u get modulation fixed
K8OGB		USA	Parma, OH		Oct 5, 1959	10	Fone
W8EPP		USA	Parma, OH	44134	Sep 6, 1967		Fone	Vic was VE1
W8IRG	W8IRG-1	USA	Parma, OH	44129				Hi Brains
W8IRG	W8IRG-2 – Now W5UOY	USA	Pascagoula, MS	39567				Now a W5
W8MAK		USA	Lyndhurst, OH		Jul 21, 1961	10	Fone
W8MQP		USA	Cleveland, OH			6
W8MWC	W8MWC-2	USA	Parma, OH	44130	Apr 25, 1977	20	Fone	Last QSO before W8HC
W8MWL	W8MWL-1	USA	Canton, OH					Blank
W8MWL	W8MWL-2	USA	Canton, OH		Feb 11, 1936			Blank
W8MWL	W8MWL-3	USA	Canton, OH					Blank
W8NJF		USA	Bedford, OH					Blank
W8NYJ		USA	Parma, OH					Blank
W8OAR	W8OAR-1	USA	South Euclid, OH	44118	Sep 10, 1967	20	SSB
W8OAR	W8OAR-4	USA	South Euclid, OH					Get well soon
W8OAR	W8OAR-3	USA	South Euclid, OH					Get well soon
W8OPM		USA	Cleveland, OH	44121				Blank
WB8GAL	WB8GAL-1	USA	Parma, OH	44134	Nov 6, 1981			Get well soon
WB8GAL	WB8GAL-2	USA	Parma, OH	44134				Blank
WB8GAL	WB8GAL-3	USA	Parma, OH	44134				Get well soon
WB8JSC		USA	Parma, OH	44134				Phone number

Cleveland Metroparks Reptile Day!

Posted on August 28, 2011 by George Burgyan

The Cleveland Metroparks did their “Snake, Turtles and Fun!” day yesterday at the South Chagrin Reservation just a mile or so from our house. They lied — they also had lizards and geckos and tortoises as well. They did have fun though!

It’s been a long time since I pet critters like that… I had to have been something like 8 or 9 years old the last time I touched a snake.

Cool stuff!

It’s great the that we have an organization here in town that does all this stuff. I was especially happy that so many people came out to have fun!

View photos at SmugMug

Storage decisions

Posted on August 27, 2011 by George Burgyan

I finally got a bit annoyed at the noise that my farm of drives is making behind my computer. The computer in question in this case is a 27″ iMac. This machine is dead quiet at all but the highest loads when the fans kick in a bit more than normal.

At this point I came up with two high-level set of options:

Move the drives to the closet in the office
Move the drives to the basement

These then get broken up in a couple of different ways too.

In the closet I can put the drives attached to the iMac with a long firewire cable (with an extender) or attached to something like a TimeCapsule or something.

In the basement another option can open up: attached to a spare machine running something like FreeNAS.

I did a quick test by attaching one my external drives to the AirPort via USB and did a quick test of the performance. I was able to read at around 20MB/s which is disappointing considering that I am getting 80MB/s attached with firewire. I should point out that the network is gigabit Ethernet the whole way so that wouldn’t be the limiting factor. It seems that this would be a disappointing solution all things considered.

The other network-based option is something like a FreeNAS in the basement. I couldn’t (well, don’t want to) put that in my closet because a normal machine seems a bit loud for office for my taste. I have a spare machine in the basement that I could use for it. The problem I have is that this isn’t a server-grade device. If I have all the storage in FreeNAS then I have a single point of failure for everything. I’m also worry about the upgrade process. When it comes time to upgrade the machine for any reason I’d be building a new machine and moving all the drives over; that introduces a potential failure point if something fails to get reccognized and I’m back to looking at my backups. Another potential issue is ZFS lock-in; if things die I don’t have anything that can read a ZFS-formatted drive, or worse yet a RAID-Z1, so again I’d be back at backups. In fairness I might be able to get better performance from this solution since I could make a RAID set of drives and get a big read-speed boost.

In the end I decided to keep with my current course and just move the external enclosures to the closet. The advantage in my mind is the utter simplicity of the setup. If my iMac fails I can swap in another machine to read the drives (like a MacBook Pro with FW-800 as well). If a drive fails I swap it out for an identical backup. If an enclosure fails I can mount the drive with a USB-dock. Just about anything can fail and I’m still golden. All I need is a couple long cables and a firewire repeater and I think I’m good to go!

I don’t think it’s an elegant solution, but it certainly is a working solution.

BTW: I can get something like a Drobo or something, but ever since the epic failure I had with that I don’t think I’m ever going to trust that company again.

Constraining the future

Posted on August 26, 2011 by George Burgyan

Everyone knows the past — it’s what has already happened. In fact it’s something that can’t be changed.

The future is another matter.

You can have an idea of what the future is — or at least what you want it to be. The future, in reality, is unknowable.

You can set a direction on what general direction you want things to go, but you can’t make the future be what you want. Sure, you can try. All you’ll do is make yourself miserable by ensuring what you get doesn’t live up to your expectations.

It’s a let it go and accept the future for what it is. A “to go fast, you must go slow” attitude.

Of course this isn’t an excuse to sit back and do nothing. You have to work to get to some acceptable future. The trick is that you don’t really know what that is.

Blind faith that what you do now will get you where you want to go. Even if you don’t know where that is.

Shucks. That sounds like religion. heh.

Let the future come to you. Don’t try to go to the future.

Attic archeology

Posted on August 25, 2011 by George Burgyan

I was up in my attic a while back and I found a plastic satchel tucked into the insulation in the rafters.

I decided to go through it to see what the hell it was. It is my house after all.

I’m guessing that the folks that built the house back in the last 60′s had someone that was a bit entrepreneurial. There was some stuff on a job placement franchise and another thing on a scary party thing — but that’s for another day.

Parker Career Center Operating and Supervisory Manual
Parker Career Center Call Form
Parker Career Centers General Training and Development Program

I know… it’s dry stuff.

But this is what you did before you had Monster and Google Maps and everything else we take for granted.

And I guess it could be franchised!

Who’d'a thought?

And it’s copyrighted.

I don’t think they’ll care since their not around anymore from what I’ve discovered.

The dude has a resemblance to Bob too… hmmmm…

How to succeed in business

Posted on August 24, 2011 by George Burgyan

Have a good idea
Make a business plan
Hire good people that you trust
Trust the people you hired and empower them to make decisions
Hold those people accountable for their decisions
Evaluate where you are and adjust as needed
There are no sacred cows — just because something worked in the past doesn’t mean that it will work now

Janky Networking

Posted on August 23, 2011 by George Burgyan

This is all an upshot of not being in the new office yet and trying to deploy something to to production.

This, I humbly offer to you, is a near ideal exemplification of “janky.”

So we’re all sitting around the “board room” table at the Solon Hampton Inn. There’s a wired ethernet jack that doesn’t work right… it kind-of works, but we can’t get the VPN up and running on it.

So, here’s the whole network:

The hotel is connected to the internet and is NAT-ing that to the inside of the hotel
My MacBook Pro is on the hotel WiFi
The MacBook is sharing the internet with it’s ethernet port doing its own NAT-ing again!
We have a tiny RAP (Remote Access Point) that’s silently VPN-ing into the mothership
The RAP is broadcasting the SSID of the corporate network
Our laptops connect to the RAP and get IPs from the mothership through the RAP, my MacBook (with NAT) and the hotel WiFi (with another NAT).

Somehow this all seems to work. It only dropped the connection three times over the day… not too bad for such a cobbled together system!

W8DFL QSL Cards – 8/22/2011

Posted on August 22, 2011 by George Burgyan

The series is quickly coming to an end. In a twist of synchronicity cards seem to be saying the same thing unfortunately.

More get well soon cards addressed to the hospital… one of which…

Was delivered in person. He got over the 1975 issue though since I’ve seen cards up through the early 80′s. It’s still tough to look at them though.

Here’s the one that got to me:

A “1-way” exchange. Somewhere out there there’s a fully blank card that Jim kept along. Still had a sense of humor though.

Eventually the call W8MWC did get reissued to a John in Adrian, MI.

Vic did go on to after all this to keep on making more contacts though!

View photos at SmugMug

K8BFT		USA	Parma, OH					Get well soon
K8DFW		USA	Akron, OH		Dec 18, 1961	10	Fone
K8DHT		USA	Hinckley, OH	44233	Mar 11, 1968	10	Fone
K8DZR		USA	Lakewood, OH	44107	Apr 3, 1968	10	AM
K8EBF		USA	Parma Heights, OH		Sep 20, 1961	10
KA8ETK		USA	Maple Heights, OH	44137				Get well soon
KA8GIL		USA	Elida, OH	45807	1979			Miss you
KA8GLK		USA	Parma, OH	44129	Mar 7, 1980			Get well soon
W8APB		USA	Cleveland, OH		Dec 2, 1958	10
W8APE		USA	Columbus, OH					Blank
W8BID	W8BID-1	USA	Brunswick, OH	44212	Oct 28, 1975			Eyeball
W8BID	W8BID-2	USA	Brunswick, OH	44212	Mar 1, 1980	20	SSB
W8BKH		USA	Cleveland, OH					Blank
W8DFL		USA	Warren, OH					Vic’s card
W8EPP	W8EPP-1	USA	Parma, OH	44134	Jun 3, 1972	20	Fone	Joan?
W8EPP	W8EPP-2	USA	Parma, OH	44134	Jul 31, 1975			Parma hospital bedside
W8ICB		USA	Bedford Heights, OH	44146				Phone number
W8MWC		USA	Lakewood, OH	44107				Going away – W8HC
W8OAR	W8OAR-2	USA	South Euclid, OH	44118	Mar 5, 1980			Get well soon – Forwarded
WA8EBS	WA8EBS-2	USA	Fairview Park, OH	44126	Jan 11, 1973	15	SSB
WB8LDK		USA	Columbia Station, OH	44028	Mar 23, 1977	15	Fone

Vec Blog

George's observations

Monthly Archives: August 2011

Three times…

Speed

W8DFL QSL Cards – 8/29/2011

Cleveland Metroparks Reptile Day!

Storage decisions

Constraining the future

Attic archeology

How to succeed in business

Janky Networking

W8DFL QSL Cards – 8/22/2011