I got two checks this week.
One was from Amazon KDP, for third quarter sales of a fiction anthology I wrote: $13.
The other was from a former employer, for continuing patent royalties of an chemical I helped invent: $97.
It's going to take a while (and a lot more book sales) for these to equal out.
ArsTechnica is reporting that:
US Sen. Al Franken today demanded answers from Carrier IQ about what kind of data its software for smartphones collects and how it is used and stored. Noting that Carrier IQ has been "accused of secretly logging location and private information of millions of smartphone users," Franken forwarded the company 11 questions, many of them with multiple parts, and asked for answers by Dec. 14.
... The senator strongly hints that he believes Carrier IQ has violated various federal laws. "Does Carrier IQ believe that its actions comply with the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, including the federal wiretap statute (18 U.S.C. Â 2511 et seq.), the pen register statute (18 USC Â 3121 et seq.), and the Stored Communications Act (18 U.S.C. Â 2701 et seq.)?" Franken's letter asks. "Does Carrier IQ believe that its actions comply with the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. Â 1030)? Why?"
It is a disturbing thing to have a U.S. Senator contact you with a list of questions they want answered by some date certain. It's one thing when you hear talk about inquiries and investigations; it is an entirely different level of gut check when the letter is addressed to you personally.
The theme of the Lego Robotics competition this year is food safety. All it takes is a quick bit of Googling on "food safety", "technology", "processing", "awesome" and other obvious search terms to make me pop up to fore. In this morning's e.mail, I just got another request to serve as an expert adviser to a group of schoolkids. Given my soft spots for science, engineering and inquisitive kids, how can I say no?
https://plus.google.com/i/BTgXRan0ttU:Vj4gQOm1tvs
^^ Google+ invite link. Most of the old
Shadow Wrought's JE on saying goodbye to Slashdot made me want to post a JE about... something. Anything.
I'm reminded of how last year I finally made the decision not to renew my subscription to Scientific American. After almost twenty years, I stopped. The magazine had gotten too thin, too pretty, too political. For the last couple of years, I'd get each month's issue, flip through it, maybe read one or two articles, then chuck it. Pulling the plug on it meant turning the page and moving on, something that people in general are not especially good at.
Slashdot is like that. The stories on the front page are things I've already seen on DVICE or ArsTechnica. I never get involved in the discussions, and rarely read them, even when setting the filters extra high.
I've changed, Slashdot has changed. Time to accept that and move on.
It's been a strange year, one that has given me plenty of opportunities to change and grow as a person. The biggest surprise to me is how many times people have cited a good sense of humor as one of my chief attributes. Perhaps another surprise is that this comes as such a surprise to me.
2010 has been full of challenges, personal and professional. I've had successes and failures. I've also had successes that turned out to be mixed blessings or even failures and failures that turned out to be not so bad or even successes in disguise.
Why am I posting this here to Slashdot? Nostalgia, I suppose. My last JE here was in May; there's no way to know when my next one will be.
Goodbye 2010, hello 2011.
Where's the bug tracker for Slashdot? I'd like to be able to file bugs and feature requests.
Bugs:
Feature requests:
While some of the bugs have been fixed already, it'd have been a lot less grating if there was a good, visible way to report them and follow them as they got fixed.
Today, I realized I hadn't told you guys I'm engaged.
I went to tell you, and found Slashdot journals down. I figured they didn't care, but turns out it was brought back up.
Anyway, yeah, I'm engaged to a lovely, smart and funny gal who was already into Linux and tabletop roleplaying when I ran into her. May 20th, 2012.
Not bad for a guy who spent his formative years on Slashdot.
I've been 35 for almost a month now. I'm working at a place with linux-only guys, who think that the best solution is always free software. I feel like the old unix dude with the suspenders who still reads a.s.r. I feel ancient, as I've worked with big iron, or at least medium iron since my first job, and the guys who work in the IT department here are used to virtualization on intel platforms (so, machines considered big for their time, but not SPARCs or RISC machines).
Benny pestered me incessantly about what I wanted for my birthday. I couldn't figure it out; I was (and still kind of am) on the dark side right now, about a 4 on my personal 1-10 depression scale. It doesn't affect my ability to work, but it numbs and dulls my senses. Like I should've been elated to get the job I have now (which is almost perfect), but I wasn't. I couldn't express that level of joy. I'm still not quite there, but I'm digging out of it slowly but surely. Anyway, the day before my birthday, I figured out what it was I wanted. I wanted a guitar and lessons.
We headed to Guitar Center and I found a decent guitar, and we walked out with a guitar, case, book, picks, and an extra set of strings. I called up the music store in Castle Rock (which is where I work, 17 minutes from where we live, just north of Sedalia), and started lessons last week. I suck, but I'm sucking less at it every day. I practice until my fingers are tender, as many days as I can actually get the time, and I figure that has to be good enough.
I don't want to be the next Joni Mitchell, or even Lisa Loeb. I just want to make music, in the way I still take photos because I want people to see what I see in the world.
If anyone is looking for a 6-month gig in the Castle Rock, CO area, let me know. I'm looking for a mini-me, who can help me get the alarms in line. Someone who groks windows servers and javascript, who has a decent grasp of monitoring and alarming (snmp and nms experience would be nice, but not necessary.) I'm currently putting people through the "Chris test" by having my boss interview them first, and looking for specific skills later.
Hey, for anyone who still reads this. Rosetta Code's doing awesome, content-wise, and we're starting to implement Semantic MediaWiki. (To what end? Not sure. I've got a couple ideas, but I'm more an opportunist than a front-end planner.) I've also been shooting a bunch of photos and putting them up online--even photos that aren't cosplay, if you can imagine that. (Which you probably can; I doubt many who read this were following me on Flickr back when I went to Anime Weekend Atlanta for the first time in 2007. If you want to read what I'm really thinking, either follow me on Multiply, or see the same stuff over on LiveJournal--but get your adblock armor up; it's a scary place. I'm also on Twitter, if you really care. I'm a minimal participant, really.
If I show up as a fan for you here, I do read your journals; the My Amigos RSS feed is still useful.
Why this collection of links to me at other places? Easy; I know there are still some of you here who never showed up in those other places, and I miss the interactions. I'd post my blogs here, too, but Slashdot has relegated itself to an incredible degree of backwater status. I was lucky to find the "Write in Journal" link. I'm tempted to find some Perl script to have it suck in blog posts via RSS, and post them to Slashdot. (That's how I'm inducting my blog posts into Facebook, too.)
I miss what this place used to be. I miss the people this place used to have. I still see some of them on two or three other social networks, and some of the bonds there are tighter than they ever were here, but there's still a bunch of you missing.
I gave my notice for the contracting company. I'm going back into NMS with a passion that can't be denied.
Just 2 more weeks of waking up when other people are coming home from work.
Just 2 more weeks until I can take the dog to the dog park after work, or go to the normal park with her on her leash (we're right near Chatfield, and they have a great dog park, I've been told.
Just. 2. more. weeks.
I just got a phone call from one of the world's leading experts in food safety to ask me if I'd be interested in writing a review article for one of the leading publications in the field. He said that one of the world's other leading experts mentioned me as a good person for the job, and the rest of the editorial board (all high power people) agreed.
Naturally, I said yes.
What's strikes me as funny about this is that the narrow technical field in question (cold plasma) isn't the the other narrow technical field where I'm (ahem) already one of the world's leading experts (irradiation). [I always feel strange saying that w.l.e. bit, but it's true, so I kind of have to accept it.]
This tells me that I've made decent progress toward having two separate feathers in my cap, maybe three depending on how you define them. Coming today as it does, this happening is doubly, even triply bizarre.
It's a strange life I lead, I'll tell you that much.
It was April 23, 2008 that I took over as Acting Head Honcho of that miserable, hideous nest of vipers. After five and a half months, I'd been used up and spit out. I was done with it, and walked away.
The experience made me reconsider a lot of things - about myself, my job, my career arc, what I wanted out of life. Although I'd never really examined it, I'd grown accustomed to people doing what I wanted. It always just seemed to happen that I found myself in charge; people deferred to me, looked to me for guidance, clarity, focus. That would be "leadership", I suppose.
It was quite the shock when I found myself amid people who not only didn't magically follow my lead. The active resistance and slanderous backstabbing was a new experience for me. Although I wanted to prove myself to the higher-ups, I truly went into that environment with the intent to help. However, my motives were assumed to be as venal and corrupt as they were accustomed to. My abilities were dismissed, my skills were denigrated.
That hurt. It took a while for me to regain ground with self-confidence and belief in the value of what I'm doing here. Even with time, it took a lot of effort, on my part and from others, to get me close to the level of performance I was at before.
Why re-hash all of this?
Because we've gone through a re-organization, and I've taken over one of the newly re-formed departments. It's on a temporary, Acting Head Honcho basis. When they open it up, I'll apply and probably get the job.
Why do this? Career management. Self-defense. To prove something to myself.
If someone has to hold the reins of power in my environment, I'd rather it be me than someone with a grudge against me.
So Ben (el Husband) is building/has built a CNC router using Ubuntu and a couple of pieces of software, a CAD program (for which he paid), a CNC controller program (which I can't remember if it was free as in beer or not), a tiny motherboard, and a couple of other pieces of actual hardware for which he paid a decent amount of money (but not enough to justify actually buying a mill the size he needs). Motors, threaded rod, etc. If you want to see, he's got a video on youtube linked from the woodshop blog showing it in action.
We've had problems with ubuntu deciding to boot from the usb stick, partially because Ubuntu decided it didn't want to shut down properly, and corrupted libraries, and someone decided that certain useful utilities (say, fsck) didn't need to be statically linked, which made it rather unhappy to work with. Ubuntu has been reinstalled, and he's got a
1: The problem with the USB stick was that SOMEONE, decided that I MUST have a CDROM drive, and surely that CDROM drive would be my second drive, so they added a cdrom entry in fstab for
2: The G-Code reference page has JAVASCRIPT that detects if the gcode-main.html is in the same doc base and sets all the links to point there if so, and to the linuxcnc server if not. So someone wrote a fairly complex bit of code just to make that work, then someone else decided to not include the main page with the distribution. Assholes!
As a programmer and a unix admin, he gets a little upset.
It's here, unpacked but not yet up and running. Spent some time last night backing up the old one. At first I started copying individual folders onto a flash drive, then went for the easy route. I plugged a 700GB drive into a spare USB port and said, "Copy C:", then went off to have dinner.
It didn't work, naturally. Files in use, bizarre error messages, etc. So, I had to select files and subfiles for users, program files, all the photos from our digital camera, games, etc. Everything I've ever done for the last 16 years - my PhD, my wife's Master's, nine jobs between the two of us, two apartments, two houses, three cities, four kids, two churches, three public radio stations, innumerable committees, volunteer organizations, etc., etc., etc. - all of it comes to about 28GB. Including the program files for WordPerfect, Neverwinter Nights, Half-Life, Nethack, etc., etc., etc. which I don't use anymore.
Once the new machine is ready, I'll plug this drive in, copy over what I need as I need it. After a month or so, it will be gathering dust again on the shelf.
Our household budget is still running on QuattroPro. I made the switch to Excel at work years ago. That will be a project of top priority, since I don't want to install QuattroPro on the new machine. There's no point.
An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.
