We have to come up with the vision. Remember the contract on America that the Repubs used during the Republican Revolution? We need our own manifesto for the future.

Kuicinch may feel too much like Dukakis for my tastes. However, he has something right when he states that some libertarians, reform party, greens and other outside forces in American politics can be wooed to a Dem candidate with a unified vision of America and its future.

Here are set of my core political beliefs. I have taken these beliefs and attempted to build a real platform out of them. I propose that a platform of change around these ideals could appeal to all of America. The real key is to reclaim the language of debate and find a new progressive populist voice forged around our beliefs.

1. I believe the Government has a duty to regulate the power of corporations when the corporate interests conflict with public interests. In a capitalist society you have to work with business interests but you cannot be whores to them. When the rubber meets the road and the public interest is at stake then the citizen's interests must be preserved.

2. I believe that the full protection of the Bill of Rights outlined in the Constitution should not be curtailed. Repeal the Patriot's Act and keep government out of the bedrooms and out of the business of trying to dictate behavior and speech.

3. I believe in a woman's right to choose. It is not the government's place to regulate procreation.

4. I believe that universal healthcare is a moral imperitive and can benefit both the public and the corporate structure of this country. This can be a great benefit to both the public and business interests in America. Free up the HR departments from having to worry over healthcare and you free up an incredible amount of money into the economy. With that kind of money back into the economy insuring the uninsured with pay huge dividends in increased productivity in the end. I see a single-payer system with plenty of options much like what is available to the feds right now. However, I am open to all options that meet the requirements of universal healthcare.

5. I believe in the seperation of church and state and that public money should not go to fund religious organizations.

6. I believe in the social safety net. I believe that government can give a hand up and not just a hand out. The real issue is connecting people with jobs in the private sector. The real issue is retraining and getting people to the available jobs in their areas. Moreover, the biggest issue is figuring out how to prevent single moms from having to choose between providing for their families and abandoning their children. A workfare system with a system of available childcare, retraining programs that work with local businesses and job networking systems that focus on the local employeement needs.

7. I believe in proper education funding. Focusing on the schools in the most need is crucial and accountability for performance is important as well. There can be no more unfunded mandates. We must have the guts to put our money where our mouth is. The money has to be connected to results but the idea of results without proper funding is a self-fullfilling prophecy of doom.

8. I believe in morality in foreign policy. Too often, being pragmatic has turned to being opportunistic and bullying. In the end, we always pay for it. We have to frame our actions within the insititution of the UN and embrace our allies. We do not have to take a weak hats in our hand approach but that is not the same as being arrogant and unilateral in our actions. We have to have a policy that understand the role of diplomacy and action.

9. I believe in protecting the environment and this can be done without being proxies for industry and without destroying industry. Any progress toward a cleaner environment has to involve business interests as well as environmental groups. A balanced well thought out approach is the answer here. When the business interests work with government and play fair -- praise them (this is tough for some of us) but you have to give them the chance. This is the noose of a chance that every polluter will have the opportunity to hang themselves on. Play the game or pay big. Enforce the laws on the books with a vengence. Come up with a list of the best companies and the worst and make it a huge public affair. Take down the punks and praise those who try to do right.

10. Fiscal responsibility is key. We have to balance the budget. The borrow and spend Republicans are giving away the future for short term economic gains. We have to repeal the giveaways to the rich. We have to move the country forward toward the goal of a balanced budget. The tax cuts for the working and middle class were warranted but they were a smoke screen for other people in the highest tax brackets who did NOT want to pay their fair share. A total reform of the tax structure, simplification of the rules and the cutting of loopholes for the wealthy are needed immediately.

11. Gun safety laws need to be strengthened but a ban on firearms is not practical or workable. This is the kind of talk that soothes the hunters and brings out the harsh nuts and exposes them for the idiots they are.

12. Corporate welfare should end. It is not the government's job in a capitalist society to bail out or give aid to failing corporations. Target the worst of the pork belley giveaways to the richest corporations and make it a reform based media event. Plug this constantly along with the next point.

13. Small business initiatives that promote competition in a free market society is not the same thing as corporate welfare and should endure to promote the ideals of small business owners.

14. I believe in a military strong enough to defend the nation. A two-pronged approach to the military is needed. Weed out waste and give over better benefits to the men in the ranks. We all know there is waste in the current defense budget. This is the only way to cut down defense spending without looking weak. You highlight the cuts as unpatriotic wastes of the taxpayer dollars. You give back at least 50% of all the cuts back to the common soldiers and the vets that have given so much.

15. Independence from non-renewable energy sources should be a national goal with a set of real deadlines. A real energy policy that focuses on getting America away from the dependency on foreign oil and onto the path of using renewable resources is an idea who's time as come. We cannot simply give away more money to energy companies and destroy our national wildlife heritage. That is not the way. Initiatives and grants aimed at promoting new ideas and technologies is the real winning plan. These are the technologies that can put America businesses on top in the long term and preserve our nation's treasured resources.

16. I believe in a worker's right to organize and collectively bargain. Any law that would take away over-time benefits or prevent the rights of workers to collectively bargain must be stopped. The minimum wage must be expanded. Illegal union busting tactics must be stopped. The business of America is business but the core of business is built on the initiative, work, sweat and pride of the American worker.

Listen I have lived in the South my whole life. Dems lose by closer margins in the South than in many other Republican dominated areas.

So, how can a Progressive Dem politico win in the South. Do some research about the governor race in LA and look at Mark Warner and then think about these points.

Listen you admit you are for a woman's right to choose and then shut up. The fundies will not vote for you anyway.

You are for hunters. Half of your PR photos in the South be you with a shotgun in your hand beside a nascar racing car.

Pump up the volume on tax credits for the working poor and closing loopholes for those rich folks who don't want to pay their taxes.

You talk about conserving nature for future generations of kids to enjoy. Talk about keeping the water clean to fish in and places for people to hunt.

Talk about connecting people to jobs. Getting folks off of welfare and into the workforce in a real way, a compassionate way. Dumping folks with no hope just makes no sense.

Talk about targetting education spending to those rural schools that have been left out and unfunded for too long.

Talk about small business initiatives and getting tough with corporations that want to run rough-shod over the small towns.

Talk about helping out family farmers with loans and subsidies to protect them because all the foreign farmers are protected the same way.

Talk about fiscal responsibilty and the need for the government to pay its bills and not borrow and spend its way into debt.

Wrap yourself up in the Bill of Rights and talk about getting government out of their personal lives.

You wrap progressive politics around a populist voice.

If you want examples look up Mike Warner's campaign in VA. He aimed his message at the people and in a Repuke dominated state came up tops.

Well, I have a new job.

Here is the odd part. I am actually proud of our product. I work for a broadband ISP that has won two JD Powers awards and comes up every year rated #1 in at least a couple of the PC mags.

This is really weird for me. I am use to seeing the final product in a corporate environment as either decent or badly engineered or poor from a UI perspective or just shoddy.

Yes, I worked for software companies mostly up to this time.

I saw the code. I saw the way it was laid out. I knew the problems and the caveats.

Am I the only person out there with this epiphany?

I wear a leash today
with my name across
my neck and my company
on the return address
just another code monkey
in a cube
dreaming of an office
with a door to shut out
the glow of the florescent
lights pissing down on me
from the roof.

And I like the machine and
the life and the code
but that is never enough
they is the company
and they want it all.
where is the loyalty
inside of the greed?

Where is the love
inside the beast
that would lay you
off in a heartbeat
for the prize of a
buck in the coffers?

Still the corporate culture
beats the message
in every newsletter
and every memo
but my leash weighes me down
and that beeper never shuts up
at 2am for the sake of keeping
my love pure.

I understand that the company
has one loyalty and
that is the investor and the cold
comfort of the cash in the hands
of those I will never meet.

It is the hyposcrisy
that is beyond me.

My leash feels heavier every day...

The wires hum a song to me
As fingers glide across the keys
on a board here to surf the
endless ether on top of
the protocols of our lives.
It is the syn to the ack
of the collective consciousness
of anonymity hidden by the
callsigns and usernames
wired together in a song of
the humanity of the machine
and the dream of one mind in
the many out here in the wired.
It is the current of shock
in the waves of the data
in a feedback of song from
the lines that now
connect us all.

Never trust the gui.

That is right son. As an old BOFH I should have known better. There we were the man and me sitting there at the first box for a lvm controlled kernel software raided clustered linux box. Like total and complete dumbasses we went to Yast2 on a SuSE 8.0 box and tried to set up the RAID 1 partitions.

When we get this all set up, we mount the partitions and see only 20% of the capacity though in the partitioning tool in the gui it lists the drives full capacity. Yes, I do understand it is RAID 1 and I am NOT going to see the full capacity of both drives. I am talking about seeing only 20% of one drives capacity. We fight with the damn gui and try to see the commands its running through ps -ef but to no avail. In frustration ready to scream we hit command line utilities.

Guess, what the shit works straight up and right away.

Fsck.

Never trust the gui son. Sit close to the machine on the edge of the line and do your shit and watch that SuSEconfig crap too. Wish we used RH. Oh well...

The emotionless glare of the monitor lit my face. I sat there in front of the console, no more gui between me and the machine. Just a line. A blinking cursor beckoning a touch of my daily destiny.

I sighed because the last click was in. The soundtrack of my day was playing on the CD and the mouse sat abandoned.

I stretched for just a second. It was time to update the servers and promote the latest build from development into the test environment. The dance began with fingers flying fast across the keys. Each touch to the beat of the music coming down hard in my ears. My head was bobbing back and forth like a pianist in the zone.

This is my life here at work. Just another keyboard jockey sysadmin, build engineer, configuration manager, toolsmith schmuck playing the keys to the dreams of the business folks. There are other that can do what I can do but that is fine. I am good at what I do and the reason why is so incredibly simple.

I love it. This is the dream as I deploy another Solaris 8 box into production and help my compadre sysadmin (no longer a PFY as noted in earlier posts) to get the development app server raised miraclously from dead.

So, I sit here tapping my feet head moving to the rhythm of the key strokes and the key strokes to the rhythm of the music and the music in the end is what I make when the tasks fly checked off one by one into a lovely ether of the lines on the wings of the TCP/IP stack straight to the servers out there so far away.

So I fire up the Minutemen as I write this on the CD player. Just cruising down memory lane with D Boon and Mike Watt.

Yeah, my old pair of Chucks and all the black t-shirts are gone along with my beat up jeans shorts. I still got my Docs and I wear these new pair of Vans I got but still nothing is the same.

We did not have much of a dress code. Short hair in the days of the mullets. Combat boots, jeans, t-shirts and flannels on the few cold days that mattered. We sat smoking cigs and listening to the tunes we cared about.

Yeah, we listened to the alt/progressive music of the time. I saw REM back in their last concert at Ga Southern. I met some of the B-52 folks down at the 40 watt club in Athens. We did the road trips up to see the Killkenney Kats and BBQ killers. I saw Drivin' n' Cryin' when the toured with Widespread Panic at the Kickin' Chicken.

It doesn't matter most of the love music came out of bands like the Minutemen, the Replacements, and Husker Du. We were flyin' the flannel before grunge meant a thing. We shopped in the cosignment stores because we did not have the money for any place else. Slam dancing to old hardcore on the porch of someone's house. Going to the hat party at the old Coca-Cola plant.

I still have the scars of that old life, a couple of tatoos and memories of Little Five points in Atlanta listening to bands at the Point and eating pizza at Fellini's. God, it ain't just about getting old. It is more than that sometimes.

It is about sitting back geeking out in business casual at work cutting and pasting this into my journal knowing I lost touch with not only the music but most of the people I knew from that era. It is also about knowing it is my fault. My wife still has friends from that era a couple here and there touched occasionally by email and such. Just fading of in my chair dreaming of the 40 watt club and the road trips to Athens and listening to alternative acts in the back of Bubba's a redneck bar in a place and time that has ceased to exist.

I could not go to sleep the other night and I re-wrote my BBQ sauce recipe. When I am bored at home I read cooking books burnt out on tech books on computer subjects after years of hacking and learning. So I was in the mood to cook.

So, my wife takes off to run some errands and stuff when I get home and I start to throw together something for the kids. My son wants hotdogs with a side of carrots of all the odd things so I oblige him.

Then my wife gets home and declares that she wants me to cook up the recipe for the pork tenderloin she wants to use when we have some folks over next week.

It was this Island Pork Tenderloin Salad recipe from epicurious.com. Oh my fucking gawd it was good. You put on this dry rub all over the pork and brown it. Then you make this sweet brown sugar rub with tabasco sauce mixed in and you pat it on. You put it in an oven for about twenty minutes at 350. The trick is that this is a salad. So, when the pork is almost done you start making the vinegarette. It has curry and lime juice and orange juice and mustard all mixed with oil. Very nice.

The real fun was plating this thing. A bed of spinach greens with adovacado piled in the middle was put on the plate. Little pieces of mandarin oranges ringed the salad. The vinegarette was drizzled on top of the greens and the advocado. Then finally I put thing slices of the pork on top cooked deep with the rup and the glaze.

God, it was fun. If I had all the money in the world I would kick off the IT for a few years and open my own restaurant.

This was a comment I wrote to a f'ed up company post a while back. It was about to fade off my 24 latest comments so I thought I would post this.

My first IT company was a model for how small IT businesses could thrive.

The dot commers are amazing. I was inspired to look up an old company I use to work for. They employed about 12 people total.

They had three sales people, three support people, on tester, one secretary, three programmers and one owner. One of the programmers doubled as their sysadmin. The support staff had to work on bugs for Q&A in their time between calls. Advanced Productivity software literally had clients that were some of the biggest lawfirms around.

They made a product. They sold a product. They made money.

The guys who started the thing took out personal loans to keep it going for awhile. They passed out profits back to the employees when times were good. Honestly, if there was a place to be promoted to or a position open when I was ready to go on I probably would have never left.

Small companies can survive in the IT world. They just have to have half a clue in their heads to do it.

Fill a niche, concetrate and expand along the niche not outside it, keep employee and overhead costs low (their building was nothing grand but I had my own office).

This is basic business stuff that many companies still have no concept of.

Ok, I was not really looking forward to the weekend. My brother-in-law and his girlfriend was coming over and let us just say I have had some interesting exchanges with him in the past.

But, instead, everything has turned out ok. My wife's brother has been acting nice. I even got the chance to spend some good quality time with the wife last night while the brother-in-law and his girlfriend did the baby-sitting. Cool. I think his girlfriend is a good influence on him. Usually he is just a big snotty rich brat.

We ate at this hibachi place at Worldgate and it honestly did not suck. I mean the food was good and the presentation rocked and the guy who did our food was really nice. The only problem is that toward the end my hand was seriously hurting like hell. I do not know what the deal is with chopsticks but when I type out a lot of code in one day or something on a big roll or whatever I get the hand cramps and the carpal tunnel style pain. The same shit always happens when I use the chopsticks.

Then we went to see Legally Blonde II. Yes, there were only couples and groups of women in the theatre and yes all the men had the look of the condemned in their eyes. There were actually a few points in the film where I did not think about clawing my own eyes out poking those chopsticks from the hibachi place into my ears. I am just glad my wife was there beside me because it was a constant reminder that I should not commit hari kari. If an enemy wanted to kill all the men in an area the most efficient way would be to fill a theatre full of men, and knives, lock the doors and play this film. The killing would be horrible.

Still, it is all in jest. The chance to get out of the house with the woman I love to a dinner and then a movie was worth the bad film.

Lets get something straight I don't do networking.

I love setting up networked services, clustering, Veritas Raid stuff, tweaking out a box and making it sing. That is my stuff. Coming up with that tasty script that cleans up the core files, backs up the etc stuff and restarts that stupid every-dying daemon process the programmers have yet to figure out that is cool. Networking to me is cryptic and annoying. But then again, what the fuck do I know right?

I spent the vast majority of the day learning about snmpwalk and cisco mibs and generally fucking around and toying with snmp. It would be even better if the NST router jockeys could get it going on our servers after nearly a week with the request in but I have toyed with it on a host basis and researched the cisco stuff so I just might possibly be ready.

All this is for this network, host and services monitoring tool we are working on called nagios. It is pretty schweet but kind of a bitch to get setup just right. I toyed with the check_log plugin and realized right off the bat how little documentation there is out for these things. I went into the source code though and it was pretty clear from the shell script what the hell was going on but it was very bash/linux specific so I had to edit that up.

It looks like we got approval for the clustering software and the other admin in house is working to get a new server installed with SuSE 8,2 so we can set up a small news suck using leafnode. That is one of the few types of servers I have never set up so that is really neat. I looked over the linux gazette article on setting it up and it seems pretty easy.

I have of late become more and more political after a bit of laziness in my political activism. Here are my core beliefs.

1. I believe the Government has a duty to regulate the power of corporations when the corporate interests conflict with public interests.

  2. I believe that the full protection of the Bill of Rights outlined in the Constitution should not be curtailed.

  3. I believe in a woman's right to choose.

  4. I believe that universal healthcare is a moral imperitive and can benefit both the public and the corporate structure of this country.

  5. I believe in the seperation of church and state and that public money should not go to fund religious organizations.

  6. I believe in the social safety net. I believe that government can give a hand up and not just a hand out.

  7. I believe in proper education funding.

  8. I believe in morality in foreign policy. Too often, being pragmatic has turned to being opportunistic and bullying. In the end, we always
  pay for it.

  9. I believe in protecting the environment and this can be done without being proxies for industry and without destroying industry.

  10. I believe that election finance reform is not even close to complete and needs serious attention in regards to money and media execution.

  11. Gun safety laws need to be strengthened but a ban on firearms is not practical or workable.

  12. Corporate welfare should end. It is not the government's job in a capitalist society to bail out or give aid to failing corporations.

  13. I believe in a military strong enough to defend the nation.

  14. Independence from non-renewable energy sources should be a national goal with a set of real deadlines.

  15. I believe in a worker's right to organize and collectively bargain.

So there was this moment I realized I was knee deep in the shit. Here was this clustering software built for linux I was working on integrating into a NAS solution for another app on a Solaris box. The NAS would serve the disk storage out for app and data partitions to the happy, sappy Solaris box that would churn away running the stuff sitting on the clustered NAS. One NFS server goes South and the other picks up. It works and pretty good so the next step is testing on the dev and finally moving to the Prod environments. All good.

At the same time, I am working on putting together a network monitoring solution for our hosts and services but they want SNMP networking monitoring open to the inside montioring boxes only and the Corporate network guys have to open that up. I know shit about SNMP and how to use it by the way if you cared.

On top of that, my wife is going to go back to work soon which means more parental responsibilities so the kids are just going to end up wearing mis-matched clothes for the first months of school till I figure out munchkin dressing over again.

At least, I have some pretty cool sysadmin tasks to work on as of late. Oh yeah, my boss finally decided that having the /usr/local as a nfs share is a bad idea...duh. That is why they call it usr fuckin' local thank you very much.

I also have to learn this annoying language my boss has a hard on for that no one else uses anymore. Anyone want to take a guess what it is?

Think annoying scripting languages from the dawn of Unix time and go from there.

Ok, I have been staying late at the office the last couple of days working on this Veritas problem we have in Production and a new build of software for one of our projects.

The person before me doing the builds had all the versions hardcoded and did not set any of the path or the LD_LIBRARY_PATH stuff at all.

Drives me nuts. I had to fix all that stuff and then find a piece of this new 3rdparty package did not work with another piece of third party software. I could not figure out why development did not hit the same problem. Found out that part of the library search path for this piece of software had hardcoded the build area where the last package was made that had the old versions. Ugh. We keep one build back and I like to keep build area for that as well and this 3rdparty package had NOT been rebuilt for nearly 2 years. Geez!

Anyway, I had that all figured out and got everything all installed on test. Then I watch the new build frickin' implode on test. The next day I find that the developers had forgotten a database configuration step in the release notes that called for changing the characteristics of a couple of fields in the backend database. So, I am annoyed. However, I am happy that build has been tested valid so far.

So, I start to write this long and detailed email going over some cleanup steps for this Veritas System patches that went in on stage and production on the same project.

About this time, I get one network guy, my PFY, and my boss are all at my desk. This webserver was hosing up on the login page for this test page right during a damn demo. The network guy on this CSS router security thing set us up for an immediate redirect to the login page straight from http to https now I told him that index.html was already designed to do this. We are working off of a load balancing system and I was wondering if somehow the first redirect combined with the way the login was submitted was hosing something up because if you turned off load balancing and ran it all off of one server on CSS it was fine. I was shooting in the dark. At first it did not work. The network guy forgot to save the second set of changes. No big deal.

Anyway, I tell my boss's boss and he jumps on my ass telling me that if that was the reason then it would not have worked at all. It told me that I had not found the real problem so I might not have solved anything. I told him that people could login now and I knew that much. We got into it and he told me that I was pissing him off and to get out of his office. In this economic times that was not the kind of thing I wanted to hear.

After all, in the last wave of layoffs, everyone that man did not like got axed. End of story.

One thing is the webservers are sharing a common base dir but the configs have not been set up right to write to seperate logs. The webservers are whacking each other's logs. He told me he asked me to fix that a long time ago. Which is bullshit because he told me to hold off because they had not decided how they wanted to lay out the webserver setup.

I don't know why him getting pissed off at me bothered me so much. Well, maybe I do. I worked my ass off for twenty hours in the last two days only get my assed jumped. Fuck it. There is absolutely no need to work this hard.