Never been one to let the carrier drop

Okay. So, over the last few months, a lot of you have heard me talking about what the universe ‘should’ be like. This is actually in direct violation of one of the things I’ve been trying to take some guidence from (Smart Recovery) but I feel sort of strongly that I should (there’s that word again ;-)) try to figure out what I think Utopia for Sheer looks like so I’ll have some idea when I’ve arrived, assuming I ever get there.

I don’t know if I’ve already done so or not, but I’m sure if I have, my views have changed, so I’m going to enumerate what my latest version of it looks like here.

First of all, a system of file permissions – including blocks on individual actions and grouped blocks on types of actions, which can be applied to individuals or groups. In other words, I can set it so people I don’t know can’t shoot me – or even so people I don’t know can’t communicate with me at all in any way. Or so that some particular person I do know can’t hit me. Or whatever. Protection from each other should be a natural law, like the law of gravity.

In one version of this, if you shoot me, you see me shot but I don’t see myself being shot, and our realities are divergant – tools would need to exist to help bring back togeather divergent realities. In another version – probably more practical to impliment – attempts to violate the file permissions of the universe just result in error messages.

Second of all, nearly limitless resources for all. Yes, that’s right, I think we all should be wealthy beyond our wildest dreams without needing to work for it. I think no life form should ever fear for hunger, or shelter, or physical safety. This isn’t saying that I don’t think we should be able to work, or that I don’t think there will be many worthwhile things to do. Just that I don’t think lack of will to work should result in any threat or danger to the non-worker.

Third of all, a better understanding of how to make human relationships work. I think that there should be a manual given to every child that explains what we know so far about how to live together as friends, and how to make love relationships work. Heinlien suggested in Stranger in a Strange Land that the problem is the language we are currently using isn’t well shaped to this task, and I think that’s one of many possible avenues that should be explored. I’d like to see a fair chunk of resources put into the task of writing such a book – I realize that we have more pressing concerns, like energy and war and whatnot, but I think that our lack of knowing how to be human without hurting each other costs us considerably in how far we get in achiving our other goals, and I think that a ‘work-smarter-not-harder’ approach might be to figure out human relationships and how to make them work without making us unhappy sooner rather than later.

Fourth of all, a lack of coercion. I would not want to force anyone to live in my utopia, and I’d like to think that no one would want to force me to live in theirs. It should be possible to build a universe where it’s not necessary to punish children for anything, because they can’t do anything truly dangerous and they will learn that hurting other people isn’t good on their own. Of course, it’s not like I’m raising a child so I’m really not in much of a position to talk, but I do feel like a lot of the things we do to our children are horrible. I really question whether any person – of any sort, be it diety, human, cat, etc – should have any authority over any other person.

I know I certainly keep abusing my power with my cat by picking him up and hugging him when he doesn’t want hugged. And I feel guilty about it, and I’m working on stopping, but if I abuse power – after thinking so much about how bad power is and how bad abuse of it is – who can we trust?

So, we went to Seattle for the 4th and bought many fireworks at boom city (though still not *enough* fireworks – I should plan a longer shopping trip, and a shopping trip equipped with a wheeled cart, for next year)

We saw too many old friends to name at Tory’s annual 4th of July house party, which was fun and good.

We partied like rock stars at Bruce’s – complete with a jam session on the piano, two hours of continuous fireworks, turkey and stuffing and homemade fruit sherbert that was beyond compare, video gaming, playing with light sabres in the middle of the street whilest smoke bombs went off all around (yes, really, I have pictures), discussing me + Bruce’s charger controller board (Bruce did $300 worth of fireworks in a few seconds by not plugging Rich’s charger into a isolation transformer before programming it, or something similar 😉 bet he’s glad that I consider toasted programmers part of the parts cost for a project), and generally I think a good time was had by all.

I even felt mildly patriotic, in a Utah Phillips / Mark Twain kind of way (‘loyalty to the country always, loyalty to the government when it deserves it’). Of course, it helps that there’s some hope that our next president will be a progressive (i.e. Obama, who I’ve been liking more and more as I see him do the difficult dance of finding a way to express who he is that doesn’t leave us all thinking he’ll tell us anything, and does leave us all having hope that he’ll represent a little bit of us somehow).

I played a Sheerized version of the Star Spangled Banner, which was funny to me and possibly not annoying to the rest of the house. Now we’re off to Portland for portabeulahburgers and hanging out with my cousin, then back home to hug my Allie-cat and promise to him that we won’t go away again for at least a month. (Actually, he’s probably grateful to have some time to himself where he doesn’t get petted, scolded, etc. I’m still a petophile and a cat molester, although I’m getting better and better at respecting his needs)

So, I’ve got a machine colocated with CalPop, who offer 10 megabits and 4U for $99/month – $88/month if you prepay for six months.

I’m really wishing I’d chosen a slightly better ISP. Today, they announced that I’m being renumbered and relocated to a different building – today – with no warning. Renumbering means I have to update DNS for all my domains, including name server bindings. The bit that really gets me is the *no warning*. Who doesn’t know that they’re going to have to relocate servers even a day in advance?

So, those of you considering using CalPop for your colocation needs (hint, hint, google) – beware, you might find yourself renumbering with no warning. Or possibly worse – I’m idly worrying about whether they’re renumbering because they couldn’t pay their XO bill.

In the past two weeks I have replaced disks in five separate machines – one twice, because the first disk died after only 8 hours of use. These machines are not all in the same room – or even area code. They were all put in service at different times. Two of them were not part of RAID arrays, and one of those actually involved measurable data loss, although we did have recent backups.

I’m a little apprehensive. Something’s up with the universe of stored data.

(Where all the men are smart, the women are good looking, and the computer equipment is above average)

Well, I haven’t had time to breathe lately, much less write journal entries. I’m trying to maintain my 50+ hour work week while also putting in two days a week of packing/moving, and it’s taking a bit of a toll on me. But I remain cautiously optimistic that I will have moved everything major by June 1st. Tomorrow we’re moving the computers (at least the server-type computers) to the new house.

My back keeps hurting intermittently, then stopping whenever I actually get to the point where I’m going to call my physical therapist. I’ve been trying to sneak in the stretching exercises during my normal stretch breaks..

I’ve been getting up very early lately.. usually ~8-9 AM. Very strange and different for me.

Hope everyone else is doing well. I will try to get back caught up with everyone once I have my weekends back.

In other news, does anyone have any preferred dates (mid-July to mid-August) for the housewarming party? I’d really like to see Brenda, Dan S., Chris M., Mei, Deadman,  Josh, Ryan, and any friends/SOs/whatnot they’d like to bring along therem but I know finding a day that all said people are available isn’t likely 😉 Also, if you place your order in advance, we’ll be sure to have your favorite beverages available.

As part of the move, many server addresses have changed or are changing. If you use me for web hosting, name service, email, or some other network-related service that you have partial control over (i.e. you own your own DNS), please contact me so we can do this change with a minimum of disruption (none, I hope). I already have a colocated server providing name service so it should be possible for you to have a seamless transition.

HOWEVER – I would like to request that those of you who are using me for name service and only have a couple of A records consider finding a cheap or free name service provider to use instead of me. As you all have noticed, I move networks a lot, and the administrative headache involved in getting in touch with all of you every time I renumber is beginning to get on my nerves. I love you all, but you’d be better off this way too 😉 I’m happy to continue hosting your web sites (and assume you’re bright enough to either use CNAMEs or update your IPs accordingly whenever I move).

By the way, if any of you are already doing this and suddenly can’t see your qm-hosted site, please note that qm’s address has changed. the new address is 208.70.77.153 (which you will see if you ping qm.sheer.us or qm.numbermining.net)

Thanks..

S.

I had a problem recently with a CentOS host that is DHCPing off a older Cisco switch that takes several seconds to do link negotation.

The problem was that Ubuntu would give up on DHCPing and take the ethernet interface down before the Cisco switch got around to negotiating the link.

Is there some easy way to put a DHCP timeout in interfaces? does anyone know?

For now, what I did was put the following in rc.local (yes, this really does work):

echo -n “Activating godawful hack to get ethernet up despite very slow Cisco POS switch…”
/sbin/ip -o link set dev eth0 up
sleep 25
echo “Done”
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifup eth0

So, our landlady is selling our current house, and because I’m a complete and utter slob, we’ve decided to move rather than leave her with having to show the house with me living in it. 😉

We found a wonderful house in downtown long beach. This house features:

1) Lots more space than the current place.. about as much as the house in Seattle – which is good, because I’ve felt a little like I was inserted in the current house with a shoehorn. 😉

2) Older house – with nifty hardwood floors, stained glass windows, octagonal windows, bay windows, skylight, and other features found only in older houses. Tons of storage, handpainted dining room ceiling.. it’s a little on the dark side, but when I’ve retrofitted it with several thousand* watts of CF bulbs, I’m sure it’ll be quite nice. 😉

You all can look and see the pictures if you’re so inclined at http://kayti.peterbilt.sheer.us/photos/Public/2008/NewHouse/. These photos were taken by the real estate company and are both watermarked and lo-res, but they still give the general idea. Housewarming party TBD.

* = probably about 2. But several sounds more impressive.

Kayti has asked me to be her fiance and I have accepted. We still have a list of issues that we want to work through before we set the actual date. I think I have grown some since my last engagements and this will turn out to be a positive thing in our lives.

I have some complaints about the iPhone

1) Nothing’s (easily) removable. Where’s my SD card slot? Where’s my easily removable battery so I can have several batteries for long trips away from power?

2) The headphone jack is a standard 3.5mm but it’s not a standard jack and requires a adapter. If you’re going to give it the same form factor as a regular headphone jack, why not also actually make it work as one?

3) The battery life – at least on the one I’m workoing on – leaves a lot to be desired. Part of this might be that I’m a long way from the cloest at&t cell tower, and it’s using a lot of power just checking in.

That said, the touch interface is absolutely brilliant and the LCD is gorgeous. It’s a neat product.. but it’s not perfect.