• Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life by Steve Almond. An interesting voice and some great stories. What slowly emerges through the stories is a collection of insights about the creative process and the demons that drive creative people – how the most creative artists create for their own needs, not by commercial success, and are driven to do so. Not clear it makes them happy either but is an imperative for them.
• The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. At times fun but not amazing. Given these writers’ past works, this seems like an odd collaboration, and indeed it starts to feel a little strained, as if the authors were hucking chapters over the wall at each other, leaving the next guy an even more absurd collection of hanging threads to resolve. “I will see your intelligent turtles and raise you a race of intelligent beagles!” “Fine, I will add three more characters and narratives, let’s see if you can relate them
• Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson. I don’t think she has a bad book in her, this is another fine effort. There were a lot of moving parts and between the character shifts and flashbacks I sometimes was left a little confused, but all came together nicely at the end.
• How to Live by Sarah Bakewell. I’ve never read Montaigne. Perhaps I should. Apparently he was a proponent of living fully in the moment, so reading a book about his essays seems bassackwards. And 1/6th of the way in, I am basically bored. If the answers to the big questions in life are in here, I guess I won’t find them.

Ubuntu Edge looks doomed.

I don’t think the Canonical guys are stupid, and it would have taken about 4 seconds of analysis to figure out that a $32M crowd funding campaign was not going to ever work. So I assume they already knew that. So what is their game?

• They are getting lots of free press for themselves and for the idea of a Ubuntu phone, so that is good for them.
• If they had no intention of ever producing this phone, or seeing it produced, it would be dumb to stir up excitement and interest.
• So I assume that there is a plan, regardless of the Indiegogo campaign, to get this phone produced.
• Canonical may be using the press and interest to raise capital via other channels, that would make sense.
• Or they may have a partner on the hook to produce the phone, and the partner needs a little goading.

One way or another, I suspect this phone is coming out, or something very much like it.

Smoking is back without the stigma. These will look great with your Google Glass(es) and your bluetooth earpiece.

Now I just need something to stick in my nose.

Random things I’ve stumbled on in the last week, and that I am sure I will need to know again.

• …permanently delete some files from Github? Like when you check in something to the wrong project accidentally.
• …temporarily show a localhost web service to someone? Horribly dangerous but sometimes useful.
• …peek inside really big files from the command line? Nothing earth shattering here, I just forget to use these tools.
• …edit Python code? Pycharm worth a look.
• …structure a flask application? One man’s opinion.
• …use ansible to modify a file or install a package or whatever? All the modules are listed here.
• …use graphviz to make a certain graph or a certain shape node?
• …build a python command line? Seems less obtuse than some of the solutions I’ve looked at.
• …pick a messageq framework to use? No idea but this post suggests that perf differences are dramatic.
• …snapshot vagrant boxes? Very handy if you are trying out a lot of config options.
• …install packages from other repositories on CentOS?

In Ohio, a federal judge rules that Ohio has to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. This is going to roll through every state, company, organization, municipality. If it is unconstitutional for the federal government to discriminate against legally married couples, then it is surely unconstitutional for any other entity to do the same. Great news. If I was a responsible party at a government entity or a company, I’d make sure my organization was in compliance now, no point in waiting for the inevitable lawsuit.

The Poppy guys have done a great job running their Kickstarter campaign – they met their goals early, they’ve hit a bunch of stretch goals, it has been super positive, they have a bunch of great supporters. I think they were super thoughtful about the whole process, and I’m excited to see the product, I am of course a backer.

And it has become clear to me what Kickstarter is really for. It is not about raising money. These guys raised a modest amount, they could have funded this easily themselves or from friends. But they have built a great community of early adopters and backers, who feel like part of the team, who are going to help evangelize the product, who are influentials. And that is what Kickstarter really seems to be about (for tech products, I am clueless about movies or other domains) – it is in some sense a marketing expense, it is the way you reach out to the influentials and early adopters and get them on board and pulling for you, which is a HUGELY valuable asset for a young company. It is certainly not about the cash – the $147K these guys raised, less the Kickstarter and AMZN fees, is nothing compared to the funding needs of the business.

• Night Soul and Other Stories by Joseph McElroy. I just don’t enjoy short stories. These seem well-written and intriguing, but the lack of plot and character development due to the strictures of the form just doesn’t work for me. Giving up.
• Portobello by Ruth Rendell. Given the author I expected a straight up mystery but this is an odd little tale of characters along Portobello Road and their obsessions and delusions and misbehaviors. Enjoyable but not hard-hitting.
• The Dervish House by Ian McDonald. Somehow in my trip through the science fiction canon I have missed McDonald, and that has been a mistake. A good tale of a near future Istanbul awash in nano tech. The characters and ideas were much better than the plot, the story got a little too Dan Brown-ish in parts for me, and overall there were too many moving parts. A better book is in here, focused on just 1-2 of the characters and their stories. But still, a good read.
• Firmin by Sam Savage. I had no memory of why I bought this book, but what a quirky little tale. A hyper intelligent rat aspires to rise above his essential rat nature, with inevitable triumphs and crashing failures. Not unlike our own lives. Enjoyable.

This last book reminds me of how valuable it is to search out small publishers and see what they are emitting. Coffee House, Graywolf, etc. With the consolidation among the major publishers and the collapse of retail book selling, you can’t rely on the mainstream to bring interesting writing to you.

Apparently Linux 3.11 has been named Linux for Workgroups. How awesome, even if it is not really meant in tribute.

This was the first shipping product I worked on at Microsoft. A great great team of people. I remember how surprised we all were on the product team when the product was marketed at launch as a “Notes Killer”. We were just trying to make networking work within Windows, because up to that point, networking install for Windows was a ball buster.

I still have a WFW screwdriver.

So we haven’t received mail for about a week and I stopped at the post office, a 1 month temporary vacation hold was placed on our mail. The hold was placed at the USPS website, anyone can do this, there is no security. They had my name and address correct tho they supplied a NYC cell phone number as a contact number. Or maybe it was just a random number.

So I am trying to figure out if this is some sort of scam, was someone intending to pick up my mail (because no valid ID was demanded to pick it up), or were they planning on having it redelivered somewhere (tho the hold order had it being delivered at the end of the month to my address)?

Or was this just a db error at the post office?

I don’t seem to find anything on the internet about vacation mail hold scams but very curious.

We had a very nice visit at Firwood Farms today, this place is an unassuming little gem. Way off the beaten path, and not very commercial, but a hugely nice and good couple who own the place and make a home for rescue alpacas (as well as some of their own). And the alpacas are so engaging, very interested in meeting us (we did have food in our hands), and not shy a bit, tho a little cautious. Their eyes are stunning. This place is about 1000x more meaningful and touching than any zoo. Worth a side trip.

I’m a backer of the Poppy – I went for the microfiber bag level. Great to see a Seattle team doing well.

And what the heck, while I was at it, I backed the Openbeam Kossel Pro 3d printer – another Seattle team. I saw this printer at the mini Maker Faire here, it looks totally awesome.

However you feel about Snowden’s actions, whether he is a patriot or traitor, brilliant or naive, you have to give him credit for having the balls to take a stand. He has put his life and liberty at risk for something he believes in. He has thrown away his career, his relationships, his home, everything. I’m not completely sure how I feel about all his actions, though I have a strong bias towards more openness and more government accountability and more transparent oversight. But I certainly admire his courage.

Contrast with members of Congress who apparently were afraid to break a subcommittee rule. Gosh, what happens if you break a subcommittee rule, do you have to sit at the wrong table at lunch, or do you lose your parking pass, or do you have to wear a funny hat on Thursdays? It must be horrific.

To address my ADSL woes, I am considering getting Dish Satellite Internet Access. I’m already a Dish TV customer so this seemed like it would be the easiest path.

My physical dish location is 40 feet from my house though, and I need to make sure I have the right cable in the ground before the Dish installer shows up.

After 4 phone calls with Dish, I finally found someone that purportedly knew the cable requirements. They told me that I would keep my existing dish with its RG6 coax cable for tv, and that I would have a 2nd dish with cat5 cable for the Internet. The 2nd dish part sounds fine, but cat5? I would have expected to run another rg6 cable to a modem in the house.

Anyone a dish Internet user?

UPDATE: Finally found a knowledgeable dish technician, solid copper RG6 is the correct requirement. this is what hughes requires as well, so it makes sense to me. I just couldn’t believe that dish would run cat5 (not even cat6) outdoors, and put the modem outdoors at the dish.

Playing around with Hadoop a little and I am completely confused about where to start:

• Apache Hadoop.
• Hortonworks.
• Cloudera.
• Pivotal. Not yet available publicly but early access program available
• Intel. Probably the standard licensing restrictions on Intel software, probably not viable.
• AWS. Except I want to host locally.
• And yet more distributions.

More confusing than choosing a linux distro.

ios7 first impressions:

• the mail app i think i will like, seems a little easier to dispose of messages, and viewing messages is a lot cleaner
• i never used game center, mostly because i don’t care about the feature, but a little bit because it was so horribly ugly. nice to see that fixed
• sometimes you can be too subdued and too flat. the weather app doesn’t work for me, the difference between a sunny and rainy forecast is now so muted.
• all the new swipe from the bottom, side, etc behavior will take a while to get used to. tho quick access to airplane mode is nice.
• i’m interested in the new photo library features and sharing, tho at first glance, the whole collection thing doesn’t really work for me. collections are too small or too big.
• i hope i can airdrop easily between my mac and my phone. haven’t tried that yet.

osx first impressions:

• laggy. wish i hadn’t installed. i am sure it will get better.
• maps app is cool i guess tho i will have to see how much i use it versus the browser alternatives. the “send to iOS” feature will be great, obviously not a new idea, but still i will be happy with.
• i suspect i will like finder tabs a lot. tags? i just don’t know. evidence from other domains suggests i won’t use them.
• books, keychain – yawn. hard to get excited about when there are great 3rd party solutions that work everywhere.