that’s whacked » SeriousThoughts

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My 5 Things.

I was wondering when it would be my turn… looks like I’ve been tagged by Forrest. For those unable to see the connection, Forrest is one of the engineers in the Solaris Kernel test group in Beijing whom I worked with (on Hierarchical Locality Groups test support) when I did my six week rotation in Beijing.

So… 5 things you may not know about me: (I say may, because I’ve certainly done my fair share of exposing embarrassing secrets about myself when drunk - so who knows if you know or don’t know this already).

I don’t play video games. Seriously. People generally know me as a computer geek (true), and believe I spend most of my day on the computer (true, on weekdays) - and make the assumption that (like a lot of geeks), I must play video games. I can’t think how many conversations have been abruptly pre-empted by me interrupting with “actually I’ve never played World of Warcraft.” My self-imposed computer game ban dates back to sophomore year of college, when a huge addiction to Rainbow Six caused many a missed class, and a caused me to lose a lot of focus at school. That was the catalyst for finally wiping the last vestiges of Windows off my computer and declaring myself free of computer games. We kept a Dreamcast around for short non-continuous (read: no storyline) games for a while, but… well… every good thing comes to an end. Though I do have to admit, I do indulge in cell phone solitaire.
I dislocate my toe about once a week. Weird, I know. I’ve had this problem for as long as I can remember. I don’t know why… it just happens. And yes, it hurts like a mofo every time.
I was expelled from my first high school… and that was probably one of the best things that could have happened to me, seriously.
I sometimes wish I were Canadian. I don’t know why. I’m fiercely proud to be English… but yet I’m culturally very much American. Canada just seems to be a logical midpoint between the two. I go to Canada at least once a year to see family, and I love it there. I always have a great time. I think I could be a really good patriotic Canadian. Except for the football team… seriously, you Canucks need someone other than DeRosario to carry you. You lost out with Hargreaves (coincidentally, just named best English player of 2006!)
I’m allergic to alcohol. Tragic I know… Especially given how much I’m fond of the stuff. It’s not just the usual Asian blush either… my asthma kicks in and I get very short of breath. Does it stop me from drinking? Not really. But along with my lactose intolerance, it makes wine and cheese hour (and those of you who know me know I LOVE & CRAVE cheese) both thoroughly enjoyable and miserable.

2 comments February 1st, 2007

would you? could you?

goddamn

now that’s just pure motherly instinct. “would you” and “could you” thoughts aside for the moment… could you even physically react that fast?

i’d like to think i could, and i would. but wow. that story just got me on so many levels: sorrow, joy, and awe.

…. i don’t believe in heaven, but if i did - you know she’s there.

i do believe in karma, and that mother just got a lifetime of good karma for her sacrifice.

2 comments December 26th, 2006

oakland bans styrofoam take-out containers

from my city councilmember’s website/newsletter:

article here

effective Jan. 1, 2007 - no more takeout styrofoam containers in Oakland restaurants. this is great news!

Add comment December 11th, 2006

it shure is quiet

so i’ve had my Shure E2c headphones for a while, and have consistently held them to be the best headphones i’ve ever had in my life.

turns out, for $10 - they just got even better.

thanks to a tip from dan, i picked up 5 pairs of foam inserts made by this guy on eBay for $10.

wow!

the install was a pain in the butt to get them on the posts. now that i’ve figured out how to get the first set on, i’m anticipating an easier time with the future ones. anyway, on to the fit. damn, these are coooooomfy. they definitely fit better than the yellow foam Shure inserts. they’re softer, and tapered at the end, so it fits more naturally into the ear canal. i don’t know if it’s a result of the foam (Howard Leight “MAX” foam earplugs according to the maker, with a NRR of 33), or the fact that they sit deeper into my ear canal - but they definitely isolate better than the Shure foam. and don’t even get me started on the Shure grey inserts - these are worlds better than those.

anyway, sound quality is superb. i’ve listened to some korean pop, and the high vocals sound great. popping in some trance and D&B, and the bass response is definitely better as Dan said when he first recommended them to me.

anyway, if you have Shure headphones - definitely order these… you can’t beat them for $10.

if you’re near me, hit me up - i’m willing to spare a couple of my sets (since you get 5 pair for $10, i don’t need all 5) if you want them.

3 comments December 8th, 2006

probably an unpopular post

So I’ve got mixed feelings on the whole James Kim thing. Yes, it was heroic and valiant of him to try and save his family. I won’t deny that.

But even the most heroic efforts can be misguided or the result of mistakes.

I feel a lot of the media coverage has portrayed the guy as a hero, saviour, etc… and yes, his death is both sad and tragic - but it could have been easily avoided.

Looking at their journey, the Kim family made mistake after mistake after mistake. I’m not an outdoor survivalist by any means, but the following is what I see that they did wrong:

Relying on an Internet map solely (this one doesn’t appear to have been confirmed, but is what the Chronicle stated this morning)
Going on a back-country road without checking road conditions
Not bringing chains
Not bringing extra food/drink/emergency-blanket
Wandering off and separating from the group
Wandering off without adequate clothing in a blizzard
Wandering off without a compass

Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not out to bash the guy. His articles were great, I didn’t listen to his podcasts - but I’ve read his stuff from time to time. I don’t doubt that he loved his family and was willing to do anything for them, but we’ve learned time and time again never to separate from a group when lost.

What annoys me is that the media could be using this as a perfect time to address the issue of winter and survival, and how to avoid getting into these situations in the first place; but they’re not.

Yes, he made a heroic effort. But if he’d followed basic sane guidelines to the outdoors, he wouldn’t have had to - he would be alive, and we would all be happier for it.

7 comments December 7th, 2006

a cross-disciplinary productive day

i’ve had a fun day catching up on all sorts of little odds and ends i’d had on my to do list.

finished the final step in my migration of all my users’ home directories and web-space to ZFS.
setup drupal and started building the portal for my neighbourhood. our neighbourhood improvement association was blowing away $45/month on crappy webhosting for a phpBB installation that kept getting hacked, and a mailman list. it’d frustrated me long enough that i finally volunteered to be the webmaster. i’m in the process of building a new website from scratch that will be a full portal to our neighbourhood and provide blogs, message boards, mailing lists, and web space to any resident, organisation/club, or store in our neighbourhood
did lots of research on various brake pads for my A4. i’m planning on replacing my front brake pads tomorrow. it’s been tough finding a good recommended brake pad that has a firm bite, not-as-much brake dust, and a proper connection for a wear sensor. i’m finding that it’s hard to find a good firm sport brake that will endure my, shall we say, vigorous, driving that also has a wear sensor.
installed bugzilla on grommit. i finally got tired of hearing about our bug database sucking, and the points about project bug-tracking for externally driven projects (like ksh93) are perfectly valid. yes i realise there is much to be done on b.o.o., but due to the process, policy, and implementation of Sun’s bug tracking system, there are lot more constraints of b.o.o. i do intend to help internally anyway i can to make it better; but in the meantime, hopefully the bugzilla install will let external projects start tracking bugs and just make progress

my random thoughts for the day:

the new vienna teng cd is incredible. her voice has definitely matured since her first two CDs. the music is less raw now, a little more polished/produced. this is neither good, nor bad… just different. the CD is brilliant. highly recommended.
there’s nothing quite like a freshly bathed beagle as your soft/plush pillow when you’re taking a nap. lovely.
it’s getting colder and gloomier out now. i took the dogs to Pt. Isabel, and actually had to wear a beanie. this was also my first official soft-shell-jacket wear of the season. it’s definitely fall.
i’d always known Pt. Isabel was big… i didn’t realise it was the largest off-leash dog park in the nation. wow. go east bay parks
the chili/sourdough baguette at the cafe at Pt. Isabel rocks. highly recommended.

Add comment September 9th, 2006

convergance vs. modularity

Geoff’s post getting a blackberry prompted a great follow-up comment by Alec.

I’ve often thought about convergance vs. modularity. The geek in me agrees with most of Alec’s comments… I’ve yet to find a cell phone that plays games as good as a PSP, or a PDA that is as small and easy to dial with as a cell phone, or a cell phone that can play 20 hours of mp3s with a great interface and USB connectivity, etc. etc. so, yes… I do carry individual devices that I think are the way to go (for now), and as Alec put it: “modularity and incremental upgrading wins”. That’s very Unix-y isn’t it? Independent devices built for one purpose and one purpose only…

But on the other hand, the sane person in me who likes to wear shorts with two pockets and doesn’t want to carry 8 things in them says that’s bull. I don’t think digital convergance is rubbish - I would love to have a single uber-device that did everything. I see the cell phone getting there…. its PDA functions are almost there, and I don’t doubt that in a year or two it’ll be ready to replace my mp3 player as well. I don’t foresee it taking over the digital camera market (at least not the mega-zoom, semi-prosumer market that I would buy my next camera in)- but yes… I do think that in a short amount of time - I would love to have a digitally-converged device.

4 comments September 3rd, 2006

where do i want to go today?

lame spin on microsoft’s slogan… and i’m sure it’s never been done before.

anyway. it’s that time of year where focals and goals assessment, etc. etc. have come around; so i’ve spent a lot of time thinking about where i want to go today, and defining my goals for my next year at Sun.

where do i want to go today naturally causes me to wonder where do i want to be a year from now, 5 years from now, and 10 years from now. okay, i’m young. i should probably be wondering where i want to be 20 years from now.

my first thought is that i want to be doing something influential… and no, accidentally taking down the opensolaris.org web server, or screwing up build deliveries doesn’t count. i think at some point i’d like to get back to doing work with distributed and parallel systems - but i’m still feeling a wee bit burned out from my grad school/thesis days.

in the meantime, i’ve started working with the kernel performance group, specifically jonathan, eric, and sasha. if they sound familiar, it’s because i used to be their test guy. i figure i learned a lot with them, they’re nice guys - and hey, they bring chocolate to their meetings. karyn has kindly allowed me to have some time to work with them and hone my kernel development skills… so i hope to start blogging some more on the cool project work i’ve started on now.

so i’ve solved the short-term problem of what do i want to do today, and at least for the next couple of months: i want to be a better kernel hacker. technical skills never hurt anybody, neh?

but where do i want to be long-term? one good thing about being at Sun and being surrounded by brilliant people is that i’ve no shortage of people to look up to. certainly my collection of mentors, and tech leads i’ve come to know personally have been great. the question is… how do i get from here to there… or there… or there?

i’ve turned down a couple of job opportunities recently… and the people who have asked me why inevitably turn their eyes up when i say i love my job. but i challenge you to show me a job where i can sharpen my kernel hacking skills, while giving me a chance to work in the open source community. i love the fact that i get to evangelise, talk to people, interact with the community, and “be outside.”

i think that’s what appeals to me about someone like simon. he gets to set open source policy, and influence the direction of a massive behemoth while guiding it through this crazy open-source ecosphere. the fact that i love to travel doesn’t hurt either. would i love to have simon’s job? you bet. would i do it nearly as well? who knows. i would have to stop replying to flame-bait on opensolaris-discuss though. (yeah, you know what i’m talking about).

on the more technical side, i look at my tech lead, and that’s certainly something i aspire to do as well. it’s again, the ability to influence at a high level, a huge and challenging project while fighting the nay-sayers both inside and outside.

who knows. i notice my old mentor (old as in past tense, not old inferring anything about his age) posted something interesting about distributed systems work at Amazon. hrm…my old area of interest… my old mentor… (one of the most influential people in my career so far, i might add). intriguing.

so yes. long rambling blog. but that’s what happens when i finally get an hour of downtime to relax and catch up some thoughts that have been flying through my head for the past few weeks.

if you just skipped straight to end and didn’t read anything before this. well, in summary: i want simon, stephen, or geoff’s jobs. but don’t worry guys. it’s a long way off.

1 comment August 25th, 2006

forcing the issue

I was thinking about user interfaces to all the various commands and utilities I use today, and it amazes me how many programs have a -f, or –force option.

What’s even more astounding is how often I have to use it.

Why? Doesn’t this speak to a more inherent design flaw? Anytime I have to “–force” my program’s behaviour from its normal codepath, then I’m bypassing the program’s logic. This is a concession to the “user always knows best” paradigm. In an ideal world, our software and hardware should act in conjunction to take these kinds of choices away from users. Yeah yeah, the Matrix, blah blah. But seriously, I shouldn’t have to override my program’s default decisions - the program should know what I want.

This is a design flaw that many Unix OS’s suffer from, Solaris included. We have a group, KISS (Keep it Simple Solaris) that is working on this, and other approachability issues. I for one would love to see all these stupid “–force” and “-f” options go away.

Add comment September 28th, 2005