Randomness Posts

… or, beware of deals that look too good to be true. In my professional career, I have now found only two things that have a 100% failure rate. The first was a batch of Digium TDM-400P FXO/FXS card. Every single one we deployed from that batch at my previous employer failed. I hear they don’t have those problems anymore - using a different fab shop now, I guess. But I still don’t like that card for that specific reason. The second 100% failure rate came just this evening. The culprit is this little POS: Dual Xeon 2.4GHz 2GB ECC 120GB 1U Rack Mount Server being sold by Geeks.com. Look, it’s a 1U for $375. I’m not expecting the universe out of these things. With that in mind, let me document the last two days of my life. I ordered two of these little guys about a week ago, and they arrived on Tuesday. I intended to turn one into a general purpose test and development box, and one was going to go to Atlanta to replace the 1U Celeron in my friends’ data center. So I get the machines home, unpack them and try to boot. The first one won’t POST. No beep, no video, just a bright orange surrender HD light. Research tells me that the motherboard is fried. The other one booted up fine. I figured I was just unlucky, so I RMA’d the first one today and was going to put the OS on this one. Well, the OS install went fine but when it came time to reboot … presto. The exact same thing as the first. No video, no beep, orange HD light. Of two machines ordered, both of them failed within 48 hours and both in the exact same way. So now I’m out at least $60 in RMA shipping charges - and I have no servers - just because this company apparently has no Q.A. So take my experience as an example of what not to do when ordering a server. A good deal can turn into a major headache incredibly fast. Me? I’m ordering Dells from now on.

You know, I’m only a little over two years removed from college. I still remember what living in and around a college campus, in a college town, is like. Hell, I really miss it - I miss the hell out of Auburn. I miss the community feel; biking to campus, taking classes, hanging out with friends, going to bars and just the general feel of the area.

It seems so fitting, and yet I didn’t even realize I had done it. And now that I realize it, I’m a bit sad. As of yesterday, I’ve been out of college for two years. It seems fitting then, that yesterday I finally cut the last remaining tie I had to Auburn and gave up the 334 cellphone number I’ve had for six years in favor of a more functional 256 Huntsville number. Yeah, it’s just a number, but it’s still a little sad to me. Hell, I don’t even pay bills to the University anymore, most of my friends have gone on or graduated, and I’m going on two years in Huntsville, but that number was the last reminder of college and of not having responsibilities. On the plus side, I did get a slick new Motorola Razr, though I feel like I’m Will Smith in Men In Black and I’m gonna break this thing. I hope it’s better than the LG it is replacing.

So, for those who have either been following the James Kim saga or have been forced to because it was every other item on digg, you likely know he has been found dead. We won’t know a final cause of death until an autopsy is performed, but I have no doubt that it will show he died of hypothermia and exposure to freezing temperatures. This is going to sound insensitive, but I’m going to say it because it needs to be said: if there is a poster child for having done every possible thing wrong in trying to survive in an emergency situation, James Kim is it. I’m sorry that he died, but he went into a situation unprepared and once there made the absolute wrong choices. I just hope everyone else learns from his mistakes.

I went down to Auburn for the game yesterday. Had a great time; Auburn let the game be more interesting then they should, but took care of things in the second half to cruise to a 38-7 win over Buffalo. Except for a brief visit in 2005, this is the first time I’d spent any significant amount of time in Auburn since I moved to Huntsville. It’s only been two years. It might as well have been twenty, because I hardly recognized the place. Roads are closed, new buildings are being constructed, and lots of activity is taking place. There are two giant buildings downtown that weren’t even in sight when I was there.Everything has changed so much. It felt strange, walking around Auburn. I saw four wonderful years of my life staring back at me as thought I had walked away from something unfinished. Almost like there’s some studying that needed to be done or a party to go to. As I walked around campus, in spite of how much had changed, I noticed how much had stayed the same. I saw a black bike parked outside Cary Hall and a freshman cursing because he has an 8PM biology lab and is missing Babylon 5. As I walked down towards the Extension - my dorm complex for my first two years at Auburn - I walked past a very familiar parking space and make note of all the changes. On one side of the complex is a brand new building that wasn’t even there when I lived there - it was a parking lot. The Village Kitchen - the place I ate so many meals - is now gone as well. But I only saw that for a second.Then I looked closer and saw a sophomore struggling to carry his laundry and books to the laundry room so that he could study while he waited for the dryers that never seemed to work quite right. As I stood in the stadium, I could almost feel the junior within me; with two of his fraternity brothers within him, drinking smuggled-in alcohol and talking at length about what Coach Tuberville was doing wrong at the half. During my time at Auburn, I was a frequent poster on the computer message boards of the school newspaper, the Auburn Plainsman.I remember one particular thread when discussing as we often did the endless administrative corruption that we were so fond of. We all saw the ghosts in the cupboard and then congratulated ourselves on being smart enough to see them. The topic got onto the perceived lack of alumni involvement in anything other than athletics, and I remember saying then that “having a piece of paper entitles you to only care about football.” And as I walked around Auburn yesterday, I came to understand how completely wrong I was. It’s not that we as alumni don’t care about our alma mater. It’s not a lack of caring, but a different perception. We don’t see the problems that students see because we don’t see Auburn as the current students see it. We see Auburn as it was for us. We see Auburn through the wide eyes of a freshman trying to find a room in Haley Center with only five minutes until class. We see Auburn as hanging out with friends in Foy, or band parties at fraternity houses, or late night study sessions and trips to coffee shops. We know the bars as they were for us (The Blue Room, Finks (before it was whatever it is now and before it was Tigris), etc). Our memories have glossed over any problems we faced to leave only the perfect image of four wonderful years. We see Auburn as a football game with friends on a warm autumn eve under a sky of orange and blue. I still miss college, and I miss Auburn. But more, I miss the Auburn that was for me. Maybe that’s why it hurts when I go back and see how much things have changed. I have this image in my heart of Auburn as it was when I drove down in August of 2000. I guess it hurt when I went back and saw how much it has changed. Auburn is moving on without me. And it hurts that, no matter how much I want to, I can never go back. “The arrow of time points in one direction only.”

Looking back over the historical record, one thing becomes clear: it is what is tangible that has defined our view of history. We go back all the way to the pyramids and tombs of Egypt, and we can read the hieroglyphs on the walls. The edifices themselves tell us stories of their builders. The Greeks and Romans produced copious amounts of literate for us to consume, and their structures still stand as a testament to the collective genius of their civilizations. Is it possible, then, that we could be living in one of the worst documented times in human history? A time that future historians, thousands of years from now, will regard as a “dark period” because of a lack of any real record of the era? Let it be said that more literature is being produced than ever before. Mass printing has completely changed the dynamics; now, almost anyone can produce anything simplistically. Modern construction methods have rendered the craft of the ancient stonemasons simple in that what once took years to be built can now literally be built in a matter of weeks. Is any of this durable, though? Will it last? So much of what we do now is on computers - the irony of writing this warning on a digital journal does not escape me, by the way - and once something is wiped from the magnetic memory of a hard disk it is gone forever. There is no storing in clay jars for a hard disk. Lots of things are being produced these days, but will any of it last? What will historians two millennia from now have to say about us as a civilization - of course assuming humanity is around at all, and that we haven’t destroyed ourselves in nuclear war or massive climate change, or been wiped out my Thor’s Hammer. Always best to end on a high note.

Today, the Supreme Court ruled that governments can seize private property for private development. What the supreme court has effectively done is given the power to wealthy corporations and businesses to stomp all over individual families and competition. Let’s play a little exercise, shall we… Let’s say you own a farm. It’s farmland that’s been in your family since the 1800s. Your great-great-grandfather worked this land, and everyone in your family has worked it since. At one time, it was way, way out from the city but in the years urban growth has sprawled out closer and closer to your land. Along with sprawl has come subdivisions and shopping centers. Now, Wal-Mart has seen fit to build a super-center in town, and has chosen your land. Under this new ruling, Wal-Mart can tap-tap-tap on the shoulder of the city council and say, “Hey, we want that land over there, look at all the tax money we’re going to bring in” and the city council can kick you off your land using eminent domain provisions that were once reserved for building roads and schools, and give you whatever arbitrary amount they decide is “market value” for your property. Instead of forcing Wal-Mart to compete and pay true value for the land, they can now leverage the city government against you and get the land for fractions of what it is worth. This is one of the worst rulings I’ve ever seen come out of the Supreme Court and a complete kick in the balls to individual liberty in this country.

Ladies and gentleman, I humbly submit to you that the terrorists have won. We need to just go ahead and hand our country over to Osama bin Laden, because we’ve already given up and given the terrorists exactly what they want. And if you don’t know, I’ll spell it out for you: WE’RE AFRAID! You can see it in how we talk and in how we act. Nascar dads and soccer moms all over the country get their knickers in a twist every time the terror alert level goes from chartreuse to polka dot because WE’RE AFRAID the terrorists might attack suburbia. People buying plastic bags and packing survival kits like we’re at the height of the Cold War again. For God’s sake, people! I don’t think I realized how bad it had gotten until this week. See, when I was a kid and I first came to Huntsville and visited the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, there was a lot more to it than there is now. In addition to the museum (which is still hella cool) and all the rockets outside, they used to have a tour of the Marshall Spaceflight Center. They put you on a bus and drove you around to see the nuts and bolts of how the real NASA functions. You got to see the old rocket test stands where Saturn V engines were tested. You got to see the “world’s flattest floor” in a clean room which they used to train astronauts on maneuvering objects in space and on the lunar surface. You got to see real astronauts training in the real neutral buoyancy simulator (the big pool) learning how to work in space. You got to see pieces of the International Space Station being assembled. I remember all this because it made a HUGE impression on me as a kid. Seeing all the grand history of NASA and the bold, forward looking vision of all these geeky engineers convinced me that it was okay to accept my geekiness and be a nerd. After all, these people put a man on the moon. What had jocks and cool people accomplished that could come even close to that? For all their nerdiness, surrounded by the best technology America could come up with and given a near impossible mission and an unforgiving timetable, these people accomplished the single greatest feat in human history. Even today they were working in the background on amazing things, and I was seeing it all happen right before my eyes! I weep now. I truly do. I weep for the nerdy kid whose parents bring him to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center today. Why? Because when Sarah and I went up there on Tuesday, we discovered the awful truth: they no longer conduct tours of the Marshall Spaceflight Center! Hanging on the front of each computer monitor at the admission area were the little white surrender flags that you see seemingly everywhere now: “Due to the events of September 11, 2001, tours of the Marshall Spaceflight Center are no longer conducted.” It just saddens me so that this country is so utterly terrified of terrorists that we have to protect the world’s flattest floor and some old rocket test stands from that evil terrorist little Johnny the geek.

Well, I’m here. My cable doesn’t work, but fortunately, some kind soul has left their access point open for me to use! :P There’s a lot of work that’s going to need to be done in here to bring this place up to my standards, but it’s not bad. The drive up was mostly uneventful except for in Oak Grove when a semi tried to play chicken with me, and in Birmingham when traffic was pretty bad. Dad and Granddad got me unloaded in record time, then we went out and had pizza and beer before returning the truck a whole day early. Now. Where am I going to put all this stuff?

I’m moving to Huntsville.