LordAlexander's Journal: Christmas is Here?

I'm having a bit of a hard time getting in to the Christmas spirit. It's not just this year, and it isn't depression, or anything like that. I think that it's more about the commercialization of the holiday. Now, given that I'm agnostic, you aren't going to hear any preaching about the "Christ in Christmas," or anything similar. What I'm getting at, is that the extension of the holiday buying season to Halloween, the inumerable ads, and all the pressure to buy things for people, have combined to wring every little bit of holiday spirit out of this time of year. I much prefer Thanksgiving, which is a straight-forward family holiday, without any extra expectations.

Returning to things geeky, I saw the absolute coolest thing the other day, when browsing around to find out when the next new episode of "Mythbusters" would be on Discovery. Apparently, 2 members of the "Mythbusters" cast (Jamie and Grant) did a review of a robotics contruction set, by the name of "VEX". To test the set's capabilities, they built an articulated stair-climbing robot. To me, that is simply amazing. I remember the robotics kits that were available when I was a kid. Erector Sets, Robotics, and the like hold no candle to what is available today. Lego Mindstorms were the first kits that rekindled my interest in robotics, but the complexity of programming that was required held me back. VEX might be the very thing that gets me going into a new construction phase. We shall see.

On another note, I got a very unexpected opportunity to hone my very rusty Veritas VM skills last night. Some of our staging servers, were renamed incompletely. We'll leave the name of the miscreant out of this (me), but the solution ended up being some very creative use of vxedit, and disk group renaming. It sucked to have to work till 11pm, but I did gain quite a bit of knowledge, which makes me fel a bit better. Unfortuantely, though, I so rarely use Veritas anymore that this knowledge is not likely to stick with me for long. Especially with ZFS being the future of Solaris, I think that Veritas isn't long for the world.

Oh well...I gotta depart for my FOUR HOUR MEETING in DC with my customer. Did I ever mention that I HATE MEETINGS? :-D