When I was a kid, my family and I lived on a farm outside of town. I used to wait for the school bus at the end of our driveway, regardless of weather. Rain, snow, blistering heat (such as it is, in Minnesota) - it didn't matter. If there was school that day - and I can count snow days on the fingers of one hand - then there I was, every morning, waiting for the bus.

My favorite mornings were in early winter. It wasn't that deep, bone-chilling cold yet, and often I would find myself in a dazzling world of white. Fresh snow would have blanketed the landscape, the air would be perfectly still - the trees across the fields would be delicate traceries of white lace, the sky would be that unique milk-white color that I've never seen anywhere else. The kind of morning where the whole world is waiting, barely breathing, for something to happen. Part of me was always reveling in it, enjoying those magical moments, while another part waited, anticipating, for the moment the day would truly begin - when the magical world would end, and the real world, start. Both longing for and dreading that moment. A delicious feeling.

The best part, though, were the fields themselves. Covered with the fresh snow, they were an untracked expanse of perfect whiteness. It would be dazzling later, too bright to see, but now before the day was begun it would be something else - something mysterious, something unknown, and yet intensely familiar. This, you see, could be anything. I might make tracks across it from here to, oh, there - and that would mark it forever, make it mine; my track across the world of magic that I loved. I might not know or care where I would end up, but I knew where I was starting from, and I knew I would make the mark.

A blank page - be it wood pulp or phosphor screen - is the same. When I sit down for a post, I know only that I'm at the start, and that I will leave a mark on the page. Will it be a rant? A lament? A discussion of a question I had, a problem I solved, or a joke I heard? Sometimes I know. Sometimes I've had the entire post written in my head for hours without ever touching a keyboard. Rarely, I have them in my head for days at a time, perhaps as much as a whole week planned out before I even copy my template file. But those aren't the best ones, not to me. No, the best ones are those where I'm the little boy again, standing at the end of the driveway, getting ready to dash out into the snow. The days where I sit down without a thought in my head, or at most a sentence or two for a starting point - and the rest simply flows out, meandering here and there, until I reach the end. Which is simultaneously the best and worst point; on the one hand, I've finished. It's done. I can do something else, I can play a game or write some code or read some email.

And on the other... well, this snow has been used, and perhaps it wasn't as good as it might have been. Who can say? Still, there's always the next morning...

Friday, June 15 - Woohoo!

Well, let's see... yesterday was more of the same (stress, work, and stress) and then I went home and played with various projects. I don't know as I could say I accomplished anything on any of them, but I stayed busy. <G>

Today, I'm hoping to get my hands on a new server at work; a Compaq DL 360. This is one of Compaq's new "high-density" servers, designed to fit in 1U of rack space - about 3" 1.75". NOTE: Thanks Brian. This is what happens when I write posts at 1 AM... It's a loaner from Compaq while I evaluate it for use in a new project; the main thing I'm interested in is the difference between the integrated remote console card and the standard PCI-card version. It may be that there aren't any, but even the Compaq Professional Services guy we have on contract at the moment isn't willing to guarantee that. Time to check it out for myself.

The cards - called the Remote Insight Board, Lights Out - allows remote console access to the Compaq server the card is installed in. By "console", I mean console; I can reboot the system, go into the BIOS, modify things, even use my floppy drive as though it were connected to the remote system, all through an encrypted web session. The card has its own power supply (in the PCI version, at least) so I can even log into the RIB card while the server itself is powered off. This may not seem like a big advantage over a KVM - and for most "normal" purposes, it's not. In fact, it's a disadvantage, since the connection is definitely slower than actually using a true keyboard and mouse.

On the other hand, so long as I have a network connection to the server in question, I can access it from anywhere. The server could be under my desk, in the data center down the street, or in a data center in Texas - it doesn't matter. So long as the hardware itself is OK, I can administer the box from anywhere in the world almost as well as I could standing in front of the box. I'm used to that in Unix - ssh makes such things easy and secure. With Windows, though... well, you just can't do that reliably. The command line can't do everything that the GUI can do, so without true console access, you can't really access everything. The RIB card fixes that, and securely, too, using SSL.

Other than that, I've got the usual meetings and paperwork, and then Keri and I are going to go watch Jon's race. See you all later...

Thursday, June 14 - Another Year, Another Dollar

Ooops. Sorry about that. Not much I can say, though - the last few days (and longer) have been a cycle of waking up, going to work, coming home, and barely managing to decompress from the day before falling asleep and starting the cycle again. This has happened before - it's called "life", I believe - and it'll happen again. All I can do is watch for an opportunity to strangle the guards with my shoelaces and run for the gate... oh, wait. That's a different problem. Never mind.

Tuesday was my birthday, yes, thank you. Among the boring computer-ish things (new monitor, printer, speakers, etc) my lovely wife got me a few highly appreciated gifts - a new box of crayons, a couple of packages of pencils, a note pad/sketch pad, and a pencil box.

Now granted, this might seem a little strange. And I'm not really sure what I'll do with the crayons, although they at least made me laugh. The pencils are a must, though. When I was in elementary school, teachers and my parents used to comment on the imaginative uses I had for pencils; when daydreaming or playing alone, the pencil could represent anything - an aircraft, a rocket, missiles, guns, whatever. (Oh, go away. I was a child of the GI-Joe generation. Ever notice how everyone on GI-Joe survived? No matter how thick the battles got, no matter how many vehicles were destroyed, the people inside would always bail out just in time - and the rifles were completely useless, apparently, since no one ever hit anyone with them. That always bothered me when I was a kid...) One side effect of this is that there are at least six identifiable chunks of pencil lead in my hands. The cool part of this, of course, is that when I wrap my right hand around a Geiger counter, it goes nuts. I freaked out a couple of teachers with that trick...

Anyway. I still need a pencil in my hands to think very well. I don't daydream about guns and missiles anymore - that's my story and I'm sticking to it - but the pencil still becomes a focus for my thoughts. Now it might form the corner brace of whatever structure I'm visualizing, or not be a part of the idea at all - but if I don't have a pencil in my hand, I can't concentrate. Period. And I've gotten more picky in my old age, too - used to be, any chunk of wood with a core of graphite would do. Now, they need to be freshly sharpened, at least half the original length of the pencil (no stubs), and the eraser must be unused. So, you see, two fresh packages of pencils really are a good gift for me. <G>

So there you go. Proof, were any needed, that I am indeed insane.

On a related note, someone saw John Dominik's post for yesterday on my monitor this morning - specifically, the bumper sticker saying that reads "I can't remember if I'm the good twin or the evil one." Thinking they were being amusing, they promptly asked me which one I am. I of course looked right back at them and calmly replied "I'm a Gemini, an NT admin, and a Unix admin. I'm both."

Monday, June 11 - Yep, You Guessed It - Monday

Saturday was spent at the last of the adoption classes, and Sunday was spent with relatives, so in terms of computing activity the weekend never really happened at all. I suppose in some ways that's a good thing, though...

Culled from Slashdot, go take a look at this. This person used a commercial telescope and a web camera to take pictures of the Space Station, the Moon, Jupiter and Saturn. The images are spectacular - proof that it doesn't take a big telescope to really see some amazing sights. I'd say it makes me want to get my telescope mount built even faster, except, well, one project out of too many... who knows when it will be done. When I get to it, I guess. Sigh.

Spent some time tonight working on Fido; the first beta is running on my system, although it's still got too many rough edges to think about a public release yet. Yes, yes, I know, Open Source means faster debugging, etc. But before I release it to the public, I'd like it to at least have every feature the original software had somewhat functional - and it's not to that point yet. Working on it. Really. Other than that, spent a little time on networking questions, some time half-watching Junkyard Wars (Scrapheap Challenge for those watching it on the BBC) - the rocketry ones are (go figure) interesting to me, and I like the Demolition one they did this evening, too. The hovercraft one - well. They show it every time they do a "best of" night, whereas I didn't think much of it the first time. I guess I just don't have that refined taste for television so highly prized by marketers... ah well.

And, of course, the big news of the day is the death of Mr. McVeigh. I'm of two minds about the whole affair... yes, he claimed to have done it in retaliation for Ruby Ridge and Waco. Yes, I and many others still question what happened in those two events.

Now, that doesn't excuse McVeigh for the Oklahoma City bombing. He was, at best, guilty of the same thinking that resulted in the death of children at Ruby Ridge and Waco - that the losses and harm to children were acceptable in light of the necessity of striking the real target. At worst, he ruthlessly murdered 161 innocents for no real purpose. So I find it difficult to shed any tears over his death.

On the other hand. We have the government killing innocents at Ruby Ridge. We have the government killing innocents at Waco - possibly, according to some "inconclusive" evidence, shooting at those trying to escape the fire - and no investigations by outside investigators. No release of information. No mention by the government of any of these events - as though they'd rather forget they ever happened. Bush likes to complain about the things Clinton and Gore did while in office, but strangely never mentions Waco. Now, it's entirely possible that both of these cases were somehow justifiable - perhaps Horiuchi got bad intel, thought he was firing on an armed gunman, and instead shot an unarmed woman and her infant. That's conceivable. Perhaps Waco was a similar misjudgment. Later analysis may show that the Feds had the correct information all the time - but hey, later analysis shows the US had all the evidence needed that Japan was planning to strike Pearl Harbor. The problem is sorting through all the bad information and only picking out the important parts - and that's almost impossible to do. So, yes, it's possible that in both cases, honest mistakes were made. If that's the case, there's no punishment needed. Horiuchi was a government sharpshooter doing a job - if he had bad information, if it was an honest mistake, then it's a tragic event, a horrible event, and should trigger an investigation into possible ways to improve procedures and safety. But not necessarily a criminal investigation. This is not what bothers me.

What bothers me is that we don't *know.* The government won't say what happened. We know the result; we know some of the people involved. What we don't know is why and how this tragedy occurred. We don't know who gave the order to shoot, we don't know if there was an order to shoot, we don't know what information the shooters had, we don't know if one shot was fired or two, we don't know anything. It's simply impossible for us to say, simply because the information is being withheld. Why? What possible reason could there be for not releasing this information - unless they have something to hide? And if that's the case, what does that say about our ability to trust our own government?