It was about 1 by the time I got home last night, I didn’t stop to do any geocaching on the way home, because it was already late, and dark, and I was tired, so I didn’t want to make it any later. Oh, well, so much for my goal.
All posts by rbowen
Good food + good friend
There are few greater pleasures in life than a good meal with a good friend. I had ethiopian food last night, at the Addis, with a good friend. It was indeed a good evening.
Tonight I’m going to try to find an Indian restaurant that someone told me about. That should be good, too.
Bristol bar & grill, Creve Coeur, MO
I had dinner last night at the Bristol Bar & Grill, just a little bit down the road of where I’m staying. I was terribly underdressed, but it didn’t bother me a whole lot.
I had Grilled chicken penne with a variety if interesting spices. It was pretty good, although there was too much penne and not enough chicken. The spices, however, were wonderful.
I had a Salena Shiraz, which I don’t think I’ve ever had before. It was served *way* too cold, and so it was near the end of the mean before it was really starting to get good. But by that time, I wasn’t really able to pick out particular aromas very well, what with the chicken. So about all that I can say was that it was nice, and tasted like a good standard Shiraz.
I guess some people like wines chilled, or that enough people don’t know any better, that it’s worthwhile serving it at this temperature. It felt like it had just come out of the fridge. 🙁
Day one of training
Day one of training, and I think it went pretty well. I’ve got 5 students, and most of them have some Unix experience.
The training machines are Solaris, which is causing some problems, all related to my ignorance of Solaris. Bunch of stuff in /opt/sfw/ that I expect to be in my path already.
Once more, I praise Drury. Drury is the best hotel I have ever stayed at for keeping the business traveller in mind. Free broadband Internet in every room. Free breakfast. Free drinks from 5:30 to 7 every evening. I suppose it might be a little more expensive, but it is worth it.
OK, Palm battery is dying, and I need to go find food.
Caching to StLouis
I didn’t exactly have the untrammeled success yesterday that I had hoped for. I think I found a total of 7 caches on the drive over to St. Louis, in about 10 hours of driving and caching. Every cache took way longer than I thought it would.
But I had a lot of fun, and arrived dirty and exhausted.
I’ve got a few pictures, including several of a monastery. I kinda wish I had taken the time to go in, but by then I was starting to think that it would be very late before I got to St. Louis. Of course, I forgot that it is in a different time zone.
And I forgot to drop off any of the travel bugs that I was going to leave in Illinois. Bah.
Observations about the evolution of the WWW
I suppose this might seem blindingly obvious, but …
In the early days of the web, the convention was that if there was a bit of text that was interesting, you’d link that text to another page that gave further details. This way, a document could remain brief, but still contain a wealth of material.
Soon, an annoying practice started up. Instead of merely linking the phrase, they’d insert into their paragraph the phrase “Click Here for more information. This was aggravating, because if you just wanted to read the synopsis, you’d be interrupted every 6 words by the phrase “Click Here”. This was particularly irritating if you weren’t using a graphical browser, and so you were not clicking at all. Grr.
Well, it appears that the “Click Here” people have won. While there are a few very geek websites that still practice the Old Way, the vast majority of websites tell you to “Click Here”, as though you don’t actually know how to use a browser.
Another irritating trend started up about the time that businesses started getting web sites. Whereas before that time, the purpose of a web site was to link to other web sites, when businesses started their web sites, they started to spread the wisdom that offsite links were BAD, because they took your audience elsewhere. Or, worse yet, that you should open these links in a new window or warn your audience that links to other sites were not endorsed, and probably not worthwhile visiting.
These days, it seems that most websites are closed systems. They have links to other pages within their own website, but you can’t get here from there.
Interestingly, it’s the websites that *do* link elsewhere that are the busiest. Google, Slashdot, and Yahoo are good examples of this, but, of course, there are others. These are the sites that you keep going back to, precisely because they link to other sites.
Anyways, I’m sure that this isn’t news to anybody, but it was an interesting observation to me. And that’s what reall matters.
Waste not
I’m simply amazed at how much stuff I throw away. No matter how hard I try to conserve, reuse, recycle, reduce, I still find myself throwing away at least one large garbage bag of stuff every week. I’m not entirely sure what it all is.
There seems to be a lot of stuff in there that exists solely to be discarded. Things like those annoying stickers that come on CD cases that exist only to throw away. Or plastic wrappers that come around things that I buy. It seems that the packaging of products is insanely wasteful. Electronics things appear to be the worst offenders here, with small trinkets coming in elephantine boxes full of foam, fluff, and flyers.
Then, of course, there’s junk mail. After being at this address for nearly two years, I’m starting to get a lot more junk mail, so more than half my mail I discard immediately upon reciept.
The reason that this all comes to mind now actually has to do with a bath. I ran a bath for my daughter on Sunday, and, when it was full, realized that it was cold. Having just been thinking a lot about Haiti, I was struck by the enormous wealth that I have. Here was a bath full of clean, cold water. I don’t know how many gallons that is. But 50 miles off the coast of Miami are thousands of people who will use dirty, probably disease infested water to cook, give to their kids to drink, and perhaps wash. So here I was with this bath full of water that I could not use, which I could do nothing about but allow to run down the drain.
One of these days, we’ll be called to account for our eggregious wastefulness, while millions of people a stone’s throw away are suffering in poverty that most of us can’t even get our minds around.
A tale of two cities
The time, half-past seven of the clock on a windy March morning, Anno Domini seventeen hundred and eighty. (Mr. Cruncher himself always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes: apparently under the impression that the Christian era dated from the invention of a popular game, by a lady who had bestowed her name upon it.)
A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
Last night I tried to slightly arrange my Dickens collection. It’s much larger than I thought. But, while I have a number of copies of various books, I don’t actually have two of the same edition of anything. 😉 And I only have about 12 copies of “A Christmas Carol”. Not counting movie versions, of course, which adds another 6.
Good morning *yawn*
I should have already left.
I’m up at Dark:30 this morning so that I can go into the office to change a tape. Yep, that’s it. You see, I need the tape drive at a customer office, and can’t take it until our backups are finished. So the earlier I change the tape, the sooner the backups will be done, and the sooner I can leave for the customer office. And it seems that the first tape gets done around 5:30.
Have I ever mentioned how much I love my job? No? I didn’t think so.
Citrix
Ok, here’s what’s involved in logging in to Citrx, EVERY MORNING.
Application menu -> Citrix
Dialog comes up with available connections (there’s only one). Select connection, and press the connect button.
Citrix window opens.
A dialog box opens displaying the message “Private system”. I don’t know what this means. There’s an “ok” button that I have to press.
Login dialog pops up, requesting username and password.
RSA SecureID dialog pops up, requesting my PIN and SecureID code.
Dialog pops up, informing me that I’m using a not-for-resale license. I don’t know why I care, but I have to click OK to proceed.
Now, while all of that was irritating, here’s the truly inexplicable part. Because this is the Citrix client on Linux, and if this is the first time logging in for the day, the entire Citrix client will now hang, and I have to kill it. Because there are several processes running, I have to kill all of the processes. Because I have to do this every morning, I’ve written a little shell script to do this bit for me. So at this point in the process, I open a shell and run ‘killICA’.
Then, I return to step one above, and do all of that over again.
When I arrive at the “not-for-resale” dialog the second time, it doesn’t hang.
Then, I click an icon to launch Internet Explorer. It asks me for a username and password, and I’m logged into the system that I did all of this for.
That’s right, boys and girls. All of this is so that I can load a web-based application. So, why couldn’t I just do this from Linux? Well, because the sagacious software vendor has opted to make their product web-based, but only via Internet Explorer. So it’s not *really* web-based, it’s ActiveX, or some other such monstrosity, so that I can’t run it from any other browser.
That’s right folks. The great thing about Internet Standards is that if you don’t like them, you can feel free to make your own.