Concepts in the Paradox

Since I’m going to be fairly busy this week, I’m going to go ahead and “officially launch” my two blogs ahead of Sept.1 launch date:

First:

LastMuni, the San Francisco transportation blog. You can add this blog as a Livejournal friend to read updates on your Livejournal friendslist: LastMuni syndication feed

Second:

XenJournal, the open source virtualization blog. You can add this blog as a Livejournal friend to read updates on your Livejournal friendslist: XenJournal syndication feed

On other projects, my thesis project is a go again. This is process suspension between virtual machines in a cluster, the idea being to pause unwanted processes that talk over tcp and resume them at a later time.

I have two more projects in the pipeline, one will be an NLP blog in about 6-8 months and the other is a “Muni survival guide”. If any one wants to help me with the MSG, let me know and I’ll add you to the wiki for edits.

I’ve resumed reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I don’t remember why I stopped reading it, because I feel it is a pretty good book, and perhaps written ahead of it’s time.

Lately I’ve been thinking about what is important. What are the ideas that drive me to the next day, what is it that makes waking up and facing the day even worth it? For a few moments, nothing came to mind. It was a little frightening to think that I’ve been going day to day with no particular destination in mind. I really thought I had some master plan I was following, but at that moment I found that I had reached nowhere.
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Every morning, I wake up to the sound of th 31 line making it’s first run. I’m not sure how I can hear it, it is all the way down the block, but my alarm goes off and shortly after I hear, “Thirty-one Bal-boa, to Main and Mission”. It is sort of a surreal sound to hear in those first 30 seconds when my brain is slowly coming back to reality.

I’m working my away from bagels and frozen waffles in the morning. I picked up a few cook books in the dollar bin at Borders and have been flipping through them. Tomorrow morning I’m going to try for scrambled eggs. The last time I tried, I ended up with eggs fused to the pan. This time I’m prepared, with (soy) milk this time. That’s what was missing!

On the morning ride to work, I’m reading Tipping Point. Quite a few people at work have been reading it, along with some of the morning commuters. It’s sort of weird to turn around and see two other people reading the same exact book.

The book is basically about memes and humans create and respond to them. One of the interesting points I’ve came across is that there are three different types of people involved in creating memes, and when I say memes I mean things like the latest fashion trend, crime waves, the spread of stds, or even the number of car wrecks in a week. Author Malcolm Gladwell calls them “Tipping Points”, but really they are memes.

The three types of people are the Salesman, the Connector, and the Mavin. The salesman is what he sounds like, he talks people into things. He let’s people know it is okay to do something, like purchase a car. Then there is the Connector, he knows everyone, though few very well. This is the guy that throws out peoples’ names left and right, and knows about this great restaurant down the street. Finally there is the character I identify with most, the Maven. This is the guy that has been down to the great restaurant down the street, knows which are the least expensive menu items for the maximum food, and is always listening for new random tidbits, and buys into the details.

It’s a fairly good book, Gladwell is a good writer and keeps a repetitive and back-referencing style so a slow Bart-and-lunchbreak-reader like myself can keep up with the topics presented.

I was on my way to return some items to CompUSA, when I noticed folks standing about Market Street with duct tape “X” symbols on them. “What could that mean?” I thought. I took a photo just in case it was a new fad.

A couple sporting duct tape

The Powell cable car turn around became very silent, perhaps eerily so. Little did I know that such markings meant that they were the next to be attacked by zombies!
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I try to recycle when it is convenient for me, fortunately my municipality makes it convenient to place paper, bottles, and cans into a single container, with general trash in another. At my previous apartment, I also had a food scraps bin, so even if I used paper plates I could drop in them in to be mushed into planting soil — even with the food on them!

If we as human kind on planet Earth are to continue on with our existence, we must recycle. It benefits us economically too: recycled goods don’t cost as much to manufacture compared to raw materials, and there is a never ending stream of reusable materials as long as more people do their part.

Did you know that cars are the most commonly recycled item? They take hundreds of barrels of oil to produce, but they are also mostly recycled into more cars that don’t take as much oil to produce, and hopefully use less oil when in use.

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My poor colo server is taking quite a beating. I serve a bit from my colo, which is located in downtown SF at United Layer via NetPublishing. The box is an old Pentium III 1Ghz with 512MB of memory, but it is leased and the cost is pretty low for what I get.

I have a few more wiki’s and blogs I want to launch in the coming months, and even with the small amount of traffic I get the machine crawls during peak times (noon and 6pm) as everyone goes online to edit the wiki, comment on blogs or view photos. I typically have a memory use of 786MB, so I’m swapping like crazy, and the system load is almost always 3 (that is, three processes are waiting for 1 CPU to become available).

I’m now in the market for a new colo box. I talked to Greg, the colo provider, and he says he can spec out a new machine for me, which means I might get to finally run FreeBSD 6 (horray!). Moving to a new machine is going to be a pain, as I have had this machine for almost 2 years, and in 2 years I’ve collected a lot of databases, shell scripts, and odd configuration files to get everything working well. It is sort of like moving to a new house, you find all this broken stuff, and stuff that makes you wonder why you had such stuff to begin with!

I need to be to Bart by 6:30am to catch my train to get a ride in Oakland to attend Nerdapalooza ‘06. It’s going to be like a vacation after my trip to Defcon, which was also like a vacation. Yes, I still need to post those photos and do a run down, but for some strange reason I am hyper and sugar buzzed. Maybe it was something in the curry I had at Naan ‘n Curry for dinner, or I’m excited for yet more geekout time.

I plan to:
* Drink (Jason is driving)
* Swim (not while drunk)
* Geekout
* Eat bbq-like objects

Now if I could only sleep. I guess I will just sit here and bounce on my yoga ball in front of the computer until I get tired.

I sure did feel that one. I’m on the 9th floor, and boy did this building sway.

The room is reserved, the Wiki is updated and tshirts and hats have been printed for Hacker Jeopardy thanks to BigEdog.

I haven’t even selected what talks I’m going to yet, I suppose I’ll update that tomorrow. Even though some people have flaked, it is still going to be the biggest turn out of my friends doing anything, ever, plus meeting new people I’ve never met before in person. I even printed up business cards for the occasion.

So let’s say you are going to the con, and you want to track me down? Well, look for me in the official llama-tipping shirt, you can’t miss it. These are printed coutesy of Finnie.org, of Finnix fame. He’ll be handing out CDs of his Linux distro — ask him for a signed copy. Beware, I will be representing the pro-zombie platform this year, so if you run Windows, I might just try to eat your brain.