Concepts in the Paradox

Transbay project design selection

The whole reason we are putting up a tower is to help pay for the Caltrain terminal. All the tower designs are ugly and pre-’90s L.A. designs, nothing to show the world that San Francisco is a world-class city. At this rate we should just directly fund moving Caltrain to First and Mission and retrofit the 1939 terminal.

- Mark Ballew, 29, Cole Valley

On the way to work this morning, I walked by a young woman who was doing trash duty on Ellis street. This is part of the never ending battle against the trash people throw on the ground around Hallidie Plaza. Usually, trash duty is one of the many selections that a citizen can choose from to work off a citation or jail time. Think, “community service”. This young woman added value to her community, by giving me a warm smile and turning to me to ask a question as I went forward in my day to earn a day’s wages.

“You gotta dollah? I wanna buy a juice.”

And with that, I ignored the young woman and silently thought to myself how much this program offers the community.

January has been an active month, with dead time between events starting to go back to back with things to do.

At work, I’ve ended up diving head first into SAN virtualization. I didn’t want to go this route for a another few months, but we’re evaluating SAN technology, and the research needs to be done quickly. This stuff isn’t as hard as I thought it would be, and in fact it is pretty straight forward. LUNs here, WWNS there, sparse volumes and mirrors over there.

I finally heard back from David Snyder at SPUR, and he’s going to put me in touch with the transportation communications intern there. The idea is for me to do “online advocacy” for transit, something that I’m already knee deep in by nature. We’ll see where things go. SPUR’s membership fee was a whopping $65, but it is for a good cause. These folks seem to know what they are doing.

The car has been up for sale for almost 2 weeks now. I put it up on cars.com for $21750, but the only contacts I’ve gotten are other sales agencies wanting to list my auto for another $50. I hate to lower the price, it is already low compared to other cars for sale in the area, but every month it sits is another possible parking ticket or accident, plus deprecation and the insurance payments I have to make.

Speaking of parking tickets, the two citations I got from DPT came back after I wrote a very polite letter to the them. Their reply? Pay the $100 or find a cop to verify that the tags are current, have him sign off on the tickets, then submit $10 per ticket ($20) for “administrative fees” to have the citations written off. I about flipped my lid when I read that. The DPT brings in $40m a year, so I have little concept of why I must pay fees to have my fine waved. Such is the law, and such is yet another complaint letter for me to write. I’m getting good at writing them these days.

Finally, I went to the MacWorld expo this week. I ended up buying a keyboard cover, 2GB of RAM for my Mac Mini, and laid out the cash for an academic version of Adobe CS2 + Acrobat 8. It’s about time really, I’ve been suffering with The GIMP and I’d like to greatly improve the designs of my various blog sites. Now I have something more to learn, but it’s graphics, so it should be fun!

My sister would have been 37 today.

Today’s LISA class involves VMware ESX server. It’s starting out slow like Sunday’s day-long class, but I’m hoping to walk away with more knowledge on good practices on deploying virtual machines. Some key things I’ve gained so far:

• SAN and LVM are the best way to seup partitions

• Configuring too many virtual CPUS causes contention if you don’t need that many VCPUs
• You can’t mix and match CPU types (Intel Vs. AMD)

Also, no power outlets in this room. I’m playing power vulture during the breaks. :\

I’m here in DC for LISA.

Yesterday’s class got better toward the end of the day, covering topics I was only weakly familiar with. LVS, OpenLDAP, PAM, and even OpenMP were covered. I even took notes!

Today’s morning session is THE LATEST HACKING TOOLS AND DEFENSES by David Rhoades, which has started out with a bang. I know none of his material, showing how far behind I am in computer security. For every question you ask, he throws a little monkey at you. As of the break, I am still monkey-less.

Also, VMware seems to be the hot testbed tool here.

My first kitty, who lived with my mom in Carson City for the past 18 years, had to be put down today. She wasn’t eating and had gotten really skinny.

I don’t even have a digital picture of her to post. :(

My mom still has 4 cats, but now she is one kitty less. *sigh*.

2h15m until ZG. I’m gonna need to start drinking before I even head out.

I left my cell phone at home — again. How am I supposed to function? What if I get a text message? What if someone tries to call me?! How will I check bus arrival times?!!

Wait, no one ever calls me. Maybe since I left it at home, I’ll suddenly be popular?

When I was working at the software store in the mall during the mid-90’s struggle through college, I remember my first impression of what corruption was.

Being a freshman, I hadn’t seen much in my life. I’d dealt with customers in retail, and became confused when they tried to rip the store off, “That’s not very honest”, I’d think.

What really got to me one day was when the store was running a drawing for a lithograph from a Disney cartoon. A bunch of kids would come into the store and put in their entries into the drawing about their favorite Disney cartoon, excited at the chance to get an original piece of art from some cartoon show.

After store close on the day of the drawing, my boss turned to a co-worker of mine and asked, “What did you get you and your girlfriend for her birthday?”

“Nothing yet,” my slightly older counter part replied.

“Well congratulations, you won the drawing.” and proceeded to give him the lithograph, they were buddy buddy, and I was the frosh to kick around.

And with that, I was told to toss the entries into the trash when I took out the garbage.

My oldest sister, Christa Ballew-Matthews, passed away September 18th due to complications from breast cancer. Christa, I love you, I miss you.

See the Sept. 21st Nevada Appeal obituaries. The print edition also has a photo. Also published in various Columbia, MO and Bartlesville, OK papers.