There are many devices that are labelled âsmartâ. âSmartâ phones, clearly more computer than phone, âsmartâ thermostats, âsmartâ fridges. I donât need my fridge to tweet for me. You know what will make my fridge smart? I can set the amount of ice I want in the ice drawer and when ever it gets low, it creates more ice and then turns itself off. That is smart
August 26, 2009
The switch did not transfer
Thus, we lost power
Iâm going from memory
Two systems had problems
Switch Authentication
Wireless, I take it
But then had an additional issue
Quinton went to Radius school
Leaving us for his own company
They are close to five years old
You are not running an appliance
Iâm OK with doing that
Letâs see
The thing that really hit me
Shut down with an SMNP call
Itâs a benefit
Number one, number two
Fit in the critical group
I assume it involves some sort of agent
I never got any report
â©â© Little short-cuts being taken!
â©â© When some-thing bad happens!
Doesnât flip the switch
It worked
Engage in the partner system
From what I understand
On that Havana system
A full system failure
We do this in drills
Thatâs what Iâm saying
We need to come together
Given what we knew
All I can say is
Letâs not do anything
We didnât feel the same way
Would of come to a different conclusion
I wasnât here
That Monday morning
Itâs your service
At what point do we stop the recovery
Any other points
If it happened this week
There is never a good time
Iâm sorry
I wasnât here
I think that is impressive
Iâm the only one who tried it
All it has to do
Weâd be half the way there
Any other observations
I think thatâs a good one
These make sense to those who where there
This was originally posted at Mur Laffertyâs previous site and was lost when the site broke. I donât want to lose it, so I am reposting it here. She deserves all credit for the post, I am merely hoping to preserve it.
âYou know spies, theyâre a bunch of bitchy little girls.âââââBurn Noticeâ
Dear daughter-
You should know that you are hated.
Iâm not sure why they hate you. You didnât do anything to them. You don your princess crown, take up your sword, and pretend at Pokemon. You read your books and you learn how to draw comics and dragons and you play piano and practice kung fu. You delight in pretty dresses and weaponry. You love me when I nurture you as a mom, train with you as a warrior, and play video games and card games with you.
âYou throw like a GIRL!ââââobnoxious drunk asshole behind us at a Durham Bulls game (Apparently he threw 75mph)
There is nothing worse than being a girl. Iâm not saying this as a former girl- I quite liked being a girl. Iâm saying this from the POV of the entire rest of the world. There was a lovely feminist TED talkâââA Call To Menâââwhere a man discussed his conversation with a twelve year old boy, and the boy said he would rather die than be called a girl. And the man thought, Good Lord, how do these boys view girls, if being compared to them is the_ worst thing in the world?
_
âWhat did Jesus do, when they put nails through his hands? Did he scream like a GIRL, or did he take it like a man?âââââThe Book of Mormonâ (the musical, not the holy book), âMan Upâ
Iâve seen boys cry when injured. Frustrated. Feelings hurt. Blocked out of play. Denied something. Itâs what kids do as they learn the world around them. The world is tough; before you learn to cope, you cry, whether you sport the penis or the fallopian tubes. Itâs fucking lesson #1 after you take your first breath. I cried. You did too.
So. The world hates you. You are considered the worst thing to be compared to. Throw like a girl. Talk like a girl. Cry like a girl. God forbid we ever be girls.
No, we wouldnât want to take utter delight in beauty and love. We wouldnât want to carefully watch and study something to learn. We wouldnât want to look at the world and for just one second think that we have as many opportunities as boys. That we can play sports. Play the drums or saxophone. Play video games. Excel at science/math. * And for that second, before something or someone starts opening their shit-hole to put down little girls, we can fly.
So what can we do, dear daughter? When you get a little older, I will be honest with you and tell youâââfuck âem. You will not change their mind by arguing, by telling them they are wrong. You change their mind by showing them how being a girl is awesome. You show them by not hiding, by not being demure.
âI gotta say, you are the prettiest little girl I ever did see!â
Â
 âThanks!â
Â
 ââThanks?â Youâre awfully matter of fact about that. I guess when a boy tells you how pretty you are, youâll come home and be like, âOh MOM! He said I was PRETTY!ââ
Â
 ââŠâŠ..â
You show them by being more than your looks, even if thatâs all people comment on. You show them by your independence. You show them by being more than they expect to see. You show them by not taking their shit.
When I think of little girls, I think of you. I think of perfect math scores, a passion for science, a love of My Little Pony, swords, dressing up as Cleopatra, and having absolutely no shyness or fear. I think of someone with a sharp wit, and frightening skills with a stunt kite. I think of someone with determinationâââeven if you donât know it yet, Iâve seen it. Whatever youâre determined to do, you manage to do it.
I also think of someone who suffers confusion when kids make fun of her for liking âboy thingsâ at school, but hearing that âgirl thingsâ are bad. You like them both. You like anything that interests you, the rest of the world be damned.
I hope someday I can fly a kite like a girl. And do kung fu like a girl. And draw like a girl. And you know what? I wish I could cry like a girl. You get it all out, and then you look for the next thing, bouncing back with amazing speed. You donât do like me, hold it inside as long as possible, letting it fester, bringing me down for days. You are not bitter.
So they hate you. But fuck âem. Because you are a force of nature, a powerhouse of emotion and talent and stubbornness and potential.
Youâre worth a billion of them.
The daughter, and her glee at our new project
*_ For the record, I was told, by a family member, that i could not do one of these things because of my fallopian tubes. I wonât tell you which one._
My wife is away on business this week. I am parenting solo, which is something that I am used to at this point.
Since starting Crossfit and learning about how to improve the quality of my sleep, I have been aware of the impact of blue wavelength light and sleep. I have even purchased some amber lens glasses, although wearing them over my glasses makes it awkward. And it didnât really make too much of a difference, but I have learned why.
From a 2011 article in the The New York Times:
Dr. Brainard and other researchers have found that light composed of blue wavelengths slows the release of melatonin with particular effectiveness. Until recently, though, few studies had directly examined how blue-emitting electronics might affect the brain.
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 So scientists at the University of Basel in Switzerland tried a simple experiment: They asked 13 men to sit before a computer each evening for two weeks before going to bed.
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 During one week, for five hours every night, the volunteers sat before an old-style fluorescent monitor emitting light composed of several colors from the visible spectrum, though very little blue. Another week, the men sat at screens backlighted by light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. This screen was twice as blue.
So this is does not bode well for new LED bulbs. On why CFLs could be making things worse:
[âŠ] the University of Basel team also compared the effects of incandescent bulbs to fluorescents modified to emit more blue light. Men exposed to the fluorescent lights produced 40 percent less melatonin than when they were exposed to incandescent bulbs, and they reported feeling more awake an hour after the lights went off.
Specifically, as to why my amber lens googles didnât work:
In addition, the quantity of light necessary to affect melatonin may be much smaller than once thought. In research published in March in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, a team at the Harvard Medical School reported that ordinary indoor lighting before bedtime suppressed melatonin in the brain, even delaying production of the hormone for 90 minutes after the lights were off, compared with people exposed to only dim light.
So, while my wife is away I decided to make an experiment of it, Amish Evenings.
An Amish Evening starts at sundown and has no electrically powered lights, no active screens.
I setup candles on the dining table, explaining it to the kids as an opportunity for a fancy dinner. We didnât turn on the lights when going to bed, reading our bed time stories by candle light. Iâm sure they thought it was weird, but by bedtime they were both really ready for bed. I think they were out almost as soon as their heads hit the pillow.
As for me I had a quiet, candle lit evening.
I had my iPhone streaming music to a Bluetooth speaker1. The Pandora station was a jazz standards station, so there wasnât any need for me to select the next song or skip a song that I didnât care for.
I journaled and read on my Kindle by the light of a candle.
By 8:302, I was ready for bed. I used one last candle to help guide me up the stairs, get ready for bed and then blew it out. I slept great. The kids did too, although that could be attributed to the Daylight Savings time change.
I am not sure where this is going. It probably isnât reasonable to drop using electricity at night, but it might be informative as to when to turn the TV and lights off at night.
The other day, while washing my hands, I looked at myself in the mirror and noticed, what I think were a couple of grey hairs in my beard. I wanted to think that they are blonde. I checked my sideburns and they are light, either blonde or grey. I could have sworn they were blonde, but under this light, they look silver.
Iâm sure that when I trim my beard, it will look like a blonde hair mixed with the reds, browns and blacks. My beard is weird, it has colors that arenât present anywhere on my head. But grey isnât one of them.
âŠ
I was at the gym the other day, and in the middle if my workout, Outkastâs âHey Ya!â came on. I remember the exact first time I heard the song. I was a senior in college working with a group of twelve people on our Graphic Design capstone class. We were creating an interactive CD with video from department events edited as best as we could. We threw a couple of songs at it to make it a little more interesting, one of which was a series of very catchy Japanese jazz songs, which every agreed were good, but not quite right. I still have the Japanese jazz songs and love them, the melodic and surprisingly bombastic Japanese woman over a drum and bass heavy jazz combo have really stuck with me, but the group didnât agree.
They threw âHey Ya!â in to the timeline. It was perfect. It encapsulated our senior year in college, it was up beat, exciting and new. The project, which hinged on this video, could be finished.
Fast forward to last week.
I am cranking out some heavy dead lifts and that song comes on, still peppy, and bubble gum enough to get me through my last two sets. And then it hit me.
âHey Ya!â is ten years old.
That means I am ten years beyond college. That means that I have been working for ten years. That means that it has been five years since my daughter was born. âHey Ya!â Is a perfect marker of time.
âHey Ya!â is ten years old.
That means that I am not invincible with youth, that means that my midline isnât going to stay the way it was. That means my wedding was nine years ago and I have never been as nervous (or drunk) as I was the night before. That means that I am getting old.
âHey Ya!â is ten years old, and I am noticing grey hairs in my beard. Part of me is saddened, the other part of me is proud. There are things that would have done differently in the ten years since the song came out, but I wouldnât trade the time for anything.
Now, what cooler than being cool?
Ice cold!
I canât hear ya! I say whatâs, whatâs cooler than being cool?
Ice cold!
[W]hatâs cooler than being cool?
Growing old�
As a rule on iOS, I do not have my mail alert or notify me in anyway. I think I would have torn my hair out when I was working in IT. My wife on the other hand juggles two phones, work and personal, and has alerts and notifications on the work phone, but not the personal. She is very mindful if her email and her attention and rabidly works her inbox down to inbox zero daily.
The only issue can be a student who persistently emails. In a matter of minutes, an unhappy or needy student can rattle off 6 to 10 emails, causing her phone to send me into a notification epileptic seizure.
Today, I had an idea. Turn the VIP feature from its intended purpose to the âVery Irritating Personâ feature.
Voila! âVery Irritating Personâ mode is enabled. Anyone who you do not want to be notified of email from just needs to be added as a VIP, everything else should notify you as normal.
Last year I wrote about a local business, the Warwick Cheese Shoppe and their practice of closing on Mondays. The owner was a traditional cheese monger, a man of his trade. He could describe to you in immense detail the cheese of the week, what to eat with it, drink with it, the origin and life of the cheese. He explained to my wife and I how screw-top wine was the future of wine bottling, how it was not a sign of cheap wine. His reasoning, knowledge and method of explaining were so fine that he would have won the snobbiest wine enthusiast over.
His gusto for his trade was a fantastic addition to the delicious cheese that he stocked, curious variety of delectable international and local treats that one could walk out with, and the fantastic hand made sandwiches that I would pick up for lunch.
I canât say this definitively, but I think that the Warwick Cheese Shoppe had an influence in mine and my wifeâs decision to buy our house. It is that good a local business.
Today, I learned that George Ackerman, the owner of the Warwick Cheese Shoppe, passed on Friday. I am sad. I am not sure why. Part of it is due to my having seen him a week before Christmas, it is weird to know that he isnât going to be there. Part due to the family being unsure of whether the shop will reopen. He was a tradesman, a lover of his craft, a connoisseur of food. He was only two years older than my father-in-law when he passed too early, all I can hope is that he was at peace before he parted.
George will be missed.
Earlier this week Patrick Welker of RocketINK fame linked to my site and my GitHub repo of my fork of rbugajewski Fuck-Huff-Duff private podcast webapp. I am extremely flattered.
There was one odd thing that I noticed, weird podcasts being added to my Ping! feed that I donât remember adding. Not completely unusual, I do have some fugue moments in my week, but it was odd. It didnât dawn on me until tonight to double check the source code in the repo.
Crap
I had hard coded the site url in the bookmarklet.
I have fixed it now1, but whoever has been saving podcasts over the past few days, you might need to pull the latest changes and try again.
Sorry, and I have learned from my error.
This week I went to my sonâs Chistmas chapel, which included him singing âTwinkle Twinkleâ and âGo Tell It On The Mountainâ . He was great and I thoroughly enjoyed his performance. He has really blossomed in the past few months of school.
The thing that was interesting to me was the rabid nature of the parents trying to capture photos and video of their kids. Multiple cameras, video equipment, cellphones, all being schlepped and used, with everyone jockeying for a good vantage point. They seem so focused on capturing the event that they arenât actually there for the event. Instead experiencing it through the lenses and displays of their devices, a technological intermediary, overlaying battery indicators, number of images or minutes captured, storage space remaining. All ambient pieces of data not related to the actual event going on, particularly if the one capturing is continually ape-ing the camera to see the results of their last button press.
While I realize that there are things, illness and injury, that can take my memories from me, I would much rather be fully present at events like any sonâs Christmas chapel than a slave to capturing it. Sure, I wonât remember every detail of all of the events in my kids lives, but I will truly experience them and enjoy it with them. If I forget the details, they will help remind me. And if they canât remember it in striking detail, I would love to hear their story about it.
The other reason why I am not fanatical about capturing every moment of my kids life. The mental overhead. A woman I know takes photos at an event and then spends the moments after taking the picture trying to decide which ones to keep, which ones to delete and which ones to post to Facebook. The moments that she chooses to do this ritual is immediately after capture, while the event is still in swing, while there is still a chance to be part of the experience.
The ritual of sorting, selecting and sharing is part of the mental overhead that I am not willing to expend. In addition, I always wonder what this woman and the other parents voracious capturing are going to do with the images and videos they take.
I am sure some make scrapbooks, and others get prints. Most sit untouched, unseen. The rare few are shared on Facebook where they get some âlikesâ and a couple of comments. But all of this, getting prints, long term digital storage, posting to Facebook, it is all mental overhead.
âWhere did I put those pictures I got prints of?â
âDid I download those photos off of my camera?â
âWhere are those pictures on my computer? Did I upload them to Facebook?â
Not to mention backing the digital versions up. Seth Clifford
I donât remember the first time I lost data. I donât even remember what it was. I do remember the feeling of utter despair though, and the declaration that I wouldnât let it happen again. Since then, so much of my time and mental energy has been spent thinking about ways to prevent this from happening and creating layers of redundancy around my data and in many cases the data of those close to me.
Seth writes later about the first of the Buddhaâs Four Noble Truths: The anxiety or stress of trying to hold onto things that are constantly changing.
Trying to preserve the moment we can destroy our actual experience of the moment. The overhead of what to do with the artifacts captured can lead to more stress, and the loss of what was considered safe, will almost always lead to suffering.
I hope to never be struck with a disease that corrupts my memory, I want to cherish the memories I have for as long as I live. I also donât want to work myself into a basket case regarding what to share, where to store and how to best capture a moment.
In a sermon at church the assistant rector shared how during the season of Advent, Christians should prepare to be awakened by Christâs birth, but we have any number if things, from cellphone to calendars to todo lists to keep us asleep from being awake to Christâs presence in the mundane, everyday moments and interactions. Whether it is seeing Jesus in the moment or reducing dukkha in our lives, mindfulness is not just being physically present, but only in being fully present.
Sage advice from Aaron Hillegass regarding starting a company:
When you have Enough, the extra money means very little. Iâve been broke, and being broke sucks balls. Having Enough is awesome. How would I define âEnoughâ? Enough means that you can take a friend out to a nice lunch and not have to worry about how much it costs. I have hung out with a couple of billionairesâââmy experiences indicate that being a billionaire is just incrementally better than Enough.
Â
 Thus, as you look at your future, the question should not be, âHow can I become a billionaire?â You should ask, âWhere can I get Enough?â
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 Very few entrepreneurs have Enough; most of them eventually go get jobs.
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 (And donât even talk to me about retiring early. There are few things sadder than a smart person who retires early and spends a few decades playing golf and waiting to die. If I am really lucky, Iâll push a clever chunk of code to Github in the morning and die at the dinner table that night.)
The quote from Hacker News that inspired Aaronâs post is the reason why I am comfortable where I am:
Ran out of money. Ran out of credit. Losing house in two months (already foreclosed). Wife pregnant. Three kids all under 6. Pretty sure I am the opposite of everyone here. I am no man. Just a statistic. Everything is gone. Selling spare parts to keep the lights on. It was a nice fantasy, HN. To the rest of you: fight hard and good luck.
When ever I feel like I have had enough of the bureaucracy, enough of working for âthe manâ. I think about the alternative.
The best part of creating a company is defining a culture. If you can find a company that has a culture you like and will pay you Enough to solve problems, go work for that company. Donât start your own.
For right now, I can tolerate the culture and I get paid Enough. Thanks Aaron.