Well, after no response for many months, I emailed the Red Cross again. To my surprise and joy, I got a response on the same day! Here are some clarifications I got from them.

First, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is not one of the African countries which are high risk for Group O. The "Congo" they are concerned about is the Republic of the Congo (notice the lack of the "Democratic" prefix). So, suddenly I am able to donate blood.

They do anticipate having a screening test that can detect 100% of group O carrying blood as soon as the FDA approves one that matches their screening methods. The only currently FDA approved group O antibody test does not use the right kind of technology for their screening process.

Modpoints for sale. If you have a good one tomorrow (TT) that isn't getting the love, let me know.

I had installed The GIMP on my wife's machine way back when. Version 2.2 on Windows. She wanted to scan and crop photos, and it seemed a good way to introduce the idea of free software to her. Free, as in hobbyists are writing it and giving their work away for free. The GIMP can do an awful lot, and my wife could see that we didn't have to pay a lot of money for an app that duplicates that The GIMP does. And, you can see that the world is just a little bit nicer, that people do good works and share it.

Alas, I had to work on her machine a week or two ago. While I was there, I upgraded to The GIMP 2.6.

The GIMP 2.6 does not do "Acquire from TWAIN'. Heck, that was the whole reason she used The GIMP.

Nicely enough, the downgrade was blindingly simple. But she will have to remember to never ever upgrade.

My marriage is done. We are done.

I have nothing to say, except for that one fact. It seems right to mark this date here.

Saturday May 23 2009.

Are any of them worth a bucket of warm spit?

More to the point are there any more likely to make you call a candidate in for an interview if you spot the certification on a resume?

A few weeks ago I (and it seemed a number of other people) were dismayed that the link on the front page to the message center disappeared. I found it's been put back, though in a slightly different location. Now, underneath the list of new messages is a link "NN more" which takes one to the message center. It's on the right instead of the top center.

I know that I complain a lot about the way Slashdot is run. In this case, I want to specifically say: THANK YOU. Thank you very much. Taco and friends do deserve thanks for listening to their content-creation-base and acting on it.

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that "What's the meaning of life?" is precisely the same question as "What's the meaning of fire?".

In case anyone is wondering why I think a legislator creating a legislation against X is not proof that X is real, I present this interesting news item from Utah. Utah County Republicans reject 'Satanic' resolution. Here are some selections from the article:

Utah County Republicans defeated a resolution opposing well-heeled groups that a delegate claims are pushing a satanic plan to encourage illegitimate births and illegal immigration

Don Larsen, a Springville delegate, offered the resolution, titled "Resolution opposing the Hate America anti-Christian Open Borders cabal," warning delegates that an "invisible government" comprised of left-wing foundations was pumping money into the Democratic Party to push for looser immigration laws and anti-family legislation.

"Satan's ultimate goal is to destroy the family," Larsen said, "and these people are playing a leading part in it."

Larsen's resolution contained quotes from the New Testament on the battle between good and evil. The copy of the resolution handed to delegates stated it "fulfills scriptural prophecies about our times."

"We are not going to be the majority party if we keep pushing the Latinos out," Wright said.

But Cameron Sevy, a Provo delegate, said the GOP shouldn't be ashamed to say that America is a Christian nation

Turns out legislators can be nuttier than slashdot tinfoil hatters.

I finally took the plunge and made a facebook account. I need some weird online friends over there to scare my relatives, former co-workers, and meatspace friends.

My profile: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php?id=1711482490&ref=profile

For a while now, I've been looking at the behavior of organizations to see if I can identify where it all went wrong. The vendor I have the most to do with is a huge glaring example. Slashdot itself repeatedly gets it wrong. The thievery at hospitals, ripoffs in the mortgage industry, the slow self destruction of the USA automobile industry - it all seems to point to the abandonment of the company motto:

"It's good to be a (insert name) customer".

If that were the standard by which organizational decisions were made, we wouldn't have all this trouble.

The Novell company motto seems to be "It sucks to be a Novell customer (and we're OK with that)". They do some very good technology, but insist on overpricing it (because it is NOT GOOD to be a Novell customer) and then wonder how they are going to pay the support bill for a product with 1% market penetration.

The Slashdot company motto seems to be "We'll write the code the way we want to, and you all can piss off". Yes, as a matter of fact, I liked the front page to have the one line messages status text and link to all my pending messages. Posting this JE took far more work to get to the 'create a journal' link than in the past. But I don't expect it to change, because "It sucks to be a Slashdot content provider (and we're OK with that)".

Golden West started it's wholesale ripoff of people by handing out first ARM mortgages, then NINJA mortgages. By that time, their company motto had become "It's stupid to be a Golden West customer (but we're OK with that)". It's worth noting that the banking crises did NOT affect most of the small town local banks who don't view their customers as prey.

When was the last time someone bought a new Chevrolet and said to themselves "Well, at least I didn't get stuck with a Toyota!" (because "It's sad to be a bailout car customer (but we're OK with that)").

There are countless organizations where the company motto is "It's good to be a (insert name) shareholder (but we play our customers for fools, and we're OK with that)".

It's few and far between, but:

"It's good to be a Costco customer".
"It's good to be an Amazon.com customer".
"It's good to be a Netflix customer".
"It's good to be an Apple customer".

Why is it so hard for organizations to fight the decisions that transform themselves into a "It sucks to be a (our name) customer"?

I have released my first feature, Seven Dead Men, under a creative commons license. Feel free to download it off of LegalTorrents. If you would like to buy a copy, order it though google checkout and use the coupon code "slashdot" for a discount. The path to get to this point has been a long and circuitous one. If you have any questions about the process, ask away and I'll do my best to answer them.

Yesterday I noticed that my GroupWise mailbox was snappier. Didn't know why, and thought that maybe the email archiving software had trimmed my mailbox (which would be a good thing). I've got 19 GB in my mailbox, and 18 GB of it ought to relegated to the archive. Nope - turns out my co-worker had added RAM to the server while nobody was watching.

GroupWise has a mode called Client/Server where your desktop fat client talks to the server via TCP/IP packets. Back around GroupWise 5, if the post office agent (on the server) went down at all, everyone knew it because every machine immediately got an error on the screen: lost contact with server! Somewhere around GroupWise 6 or 6.5, Novell reprogrammed the fat client to wait instead of immediately throwing up an error. The timeout is about 30 seconds.

Last year we started a whole push to virtualize as much as we can. We use Xen virtualization, as that is what Novell supports and includes in SuSE. Paravirtualization has a few advantages, one of which is that you are essentially running a guest OS that is the same as the host OS. So when it comes time to reboot, the OS is already loaded in RAM - the Xen host just has to create the guest, and do a bit of linking. We typically see an init 6 take ten seconds from time we lose continuous ping packets to the time we get them back.

My co-worker was looking at the server stats, and the mail server showed pretty much 100% utilization 24 x 7. Certainly the post office seemed slow. He thought it might be a process gone bad, but no - the mail server was just that busy. It looked like it could use a little more RAM though.

(Prepare by opening the Virtual Machine Manager)

Init 0
Edit the VM definition to have another 1 GB RAM
Init 3

It is up, and before the 30 second timeout from 120 fat clients. Nobody notices, nobody calls. It just works (and faster, too).

Sweet. :-)

Yeah, so I've got another Freak. I liked his taste in music and his sports commentary, so I followed his journals. Apparently my questions about his politics are just annoying, though, and he doesn't want dissenters to answer his taunts. He foed me, and then responded to me. I can't really respect that, so I dropped him as a friend. Guess I'll live without his perspective.

First of all, I don't want this published to the frontpage...
Having said that, I have a quick question. I'm a Java guy that manages a few younger java guys. I have been asked to tech a .net guy that (according to his resume) has managed over 30 developers. How do I tech a guy like that? Do I just stick with OO/patterns questions? I know how to tech a java guy, but one that has more experience than me is a daunting task...

hello folks. i know i'm not around here much... but i just wanted to drop a quick update.

a new record was just released, 6-song CD "how much more difficult will this get?" its also available through itunes, amazon mp3 (you can also get the CD through amazon), and shortly be available through rhapsody, emusic and amie street.

the record will also come out on vinyl later this spring (colored vinyl of course.)

i'm also working on another sky flying by record as well. this one will be themed, and will come with a collection of short stories written by solemndragon (that accompany the songs).

i've been recording a lot lately and the next record will most likely be tracked partially and mixed (almost completely) at a local studio.

i've also been working on another music project that just started, an actual band. i've been working with a friend of mine, and we've been writing a few things here and there, mostly instrumental post-rock-ish type of stuff. we plan to do some gigging and recording probably this summer.

well, if you are really interested in checking out the latest stuff, just head to my sfb blog (http://www.skyflyingbymusic.org/)

ok, until next time :)

i just wanted to pop in here, i haven't forgotten about the folks here :)