Personal

About a year ago, I mentioned installing Tracks a “Getting Things Done application written in RubyOnRails. That was great when I had my always online desktop at the office. I could run a RoR app without a problem. Unfortunately, since I’ve left the university, I don’t have a computer I leave on all the time and my ISP doesn’t offer Rails. I started feeling the need for some sort of online task tracker, so I looked around for things that run on my ISP. Last night I found and installed gtd-php. ...

etselec, suggested I take the Brainworks Left/Right Brain Test. Results below: Auditory : 23% Visual : 76% Left : 52% Right : 47% Full details: you exhibit an even balance between left- and right- hemisphere dominance and a slight preference for visual over auditory processing. With a score this balanced, it is likely that you would have slightly different results each time you complete this self-assessment quiz. You are a well-rounded person, distinctly individualistic and artistic, an active and multidimensional learner. At the same time, you are logical and disciplined, can operate well within an organization, and are sensitive towards others without losing objectivity. You are organized and goal-directed. Although a “thinking individual, you “take in entire situations readily and can act on intuition. You sometimes tend to vacillate in your learning styles. Learning might take you longer than someone of equal intellect, but you will tend to be more thorough and retain the material longer than those other individuals. You will alternate between logic and impulse. This vacillation will not normally be intentional or deliberate, so you may experience anxiety in situations where you are not certain which aspect of yourself will be called on. With a slight preference for visual processing, you tend to be encompassing in your perceptions, process along multidimensional paths and be active in your attacking of situations or learning. Overall, you should feel content with your life and yourself. You are, perhaps, a little too critical of yourself — and of others — while maintaining an “openness which tempers that tendency. Indecisiveness is a problem and your creativity may not be in keeping with your potential. Being a pragmatist, you downplay this aspect of yourself and focus on the more immediate, obvious and the more functional. ...

I’m starting to think that there aren’t any good Internet service providers. hsarik had troubles with Rimu Hosting. My own ISP seems to be far more focused on (their own version of) security than on usability. At work we’ve been using Pair. I’ve been pretty happy with them until this afternoon around 5pm when our project went dead while we had some 50 people using it. When we first developed the project, Pair was using php4 (yeah, I know – it’s my own fault for using php 🙂 ). Fortunately, they also provided phpwrap to allow cgi access. Okay, that’s not great, but it at least let our project which required php5 go live. Sometime recently, they made the default php5 without phpwrap. If I had known, well great – but I didn’t see any mention of it. Today, right after I went home they broke phpwrap. Easy enough to fix, but still irritating.

From skvidal. If you haven’t seen powertop yet, you’ve got to look into it. Arjan van de Ven, one of the linux kernel hackers and an employee of Intel, released powertop back in May. What is powertop? Think of the Unix “top, but monitoring power, not CPU, usage. It tells you how long you are spending in different CPU states, how long at different CPU frequencies, what is waking up the CPU most frequently, and best of all, it makes recommendations for saving power. ...

It’s been a bit strange changing jobs. My former responsibilities as the security officer for a university are so different from what I’m doing now. A few idle thoughts: Life at the university, particularly for management, is entirely interrupt driven. Between the phone calls, urgent emails and meetings, I seldom had time to stop and think. Unfortunately, that meant that a lot of work was done at home. At the new place, work is nowhere near as disruptive. I’m in the office for eight hours and I get eight hours worth of work done. No meetings. No phone calls. Few emails – none urgent. The change has been a little jarring. The biggest advantage is that I’m not trying to actually do all of my work at the end of the day, so I’m leaving and getting home at a reasonable time. The university structures its benefits to the advantage of the highest paid. Everyone has to pay for a share of their health insurance. The 403b, which is incredible, pays progressively more for people at the high end of the pay scale. IIRC, if you put in 3%, they put in ~8% for the first $50k of salary and then ~13% for anything above that – assuming that you are in the better paid category of staff. Hourly employees receive less contribution and have a 5 year vesting period. At the new place, they cap at 4% of your salary, so it’s nowhere near as much in retirement. However, they also pay full health and dental. The upshot is that everyone receives health benefits, regardless of income. Retirement benefits which are typically only used by people at the high end of the income scale are less generous. Overall, a far more equitable system. I’m finding that I’m much more relaxed. I am responsible for the implementation of a decent sized project, but because it’s only one project, there is much less stress and I’m not working in the evenings. Which gives me time to find great things online. Like the following from Adlai Stevenson in the 1950s: “via ovicipitum dura est or “the way of the eggheads is hard.

Done. Finished. That’s all she wrote. Yesterday was my last day at the university. Sometime before I left, I started thinking about what, if anything, I wanted to leave on my whiteboard. The obvious came to mind: “So long and thanks for all the fish. But that’s a little too obvious. My next thought was to crib a few lines from Jonathan Coulton: I fear nothing Anymore See you all in hell ...

I’ve got about three weeks to go. Unfortunately, my list of projects or things to get done seems to be growing longer, not shorter and I’m losing my motivation :-/ I think the hardest thing about leaving is resisting the urge to tell people the truth about what I think of their ideas, or their meetings, or the organization in general. Resisting that urge gets harder every day, even though I know that it would be entirely pointless. It might make me feel better to vent for a bit, but what would it accomplish? I would aggravate some people off, burn some bridges and no one would actually listen to what I was saying – no matter how well reasoned or explained. ...

Well, it’s official now. I’m leaving the university to go work for a private company – my last day will be August 10th which gives me all of a 4 day weekend before starting full time for the new place. FWIW, I’m definitely looking forward to the change. I’ve been in my current job for about 6.5 years and in the tradition of my family, that means that I’ve been doing the same thing a year and a half too long. ...

Browsing the New York Times website, I ran across the blog of Stanley Fish. Fish, if you’ve never heard of him (lucky you), is an academic star. He is an English professor specializing in deconstruction. In other words, he is not interested in truth; he is only interested in being right by proving that nothing is true. The blog posts which caught my eye were a series describing Fish’s analysis of three recent books on atheism. Those of Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchen. Sparing you the arguments, Fish concludes in his first post, The Three Atheists, that Harris, Dawkins and Hitchen are not contributing anything new. Unfortunately, he does not come to this conclusion by examining the what the books say, but only by applying some of the key principles of the books to religious arguments that he knows have already been made within the context of religion and then assuming he knows how the authors would respond. This is a neat trick that allows him to suggest that there is nothing new in the books without actually engaging in the arguments the books make. ...

I hope everyone had a good 4th of July and if you had the day off, you enjoyed it. I spent my day doing a little of this and a little of that. I picked up a low water use irrigation system that I’ve run to the flowers and the blueberry bushes. I’ll need a few hundred more feet of pipe to run it out to all of the trees, but this is a good start. ...