Geek

There’s been a lot of talk over the past 48 hours about Climate Change. I’ve heard also sorts of people debate as to what is happening with Climate Change on a global scale, its impact on the economy, who is responsible for Climate Change and whether the climate is even changing or not. Many believe that Climate Change is part of a cycle and that the Earth will take care of itself. Scientists believe that humans are having a definite negative impact on the climate and we may be mucking it up to the point of very dire events over this century.

Of course, Trump announced yesterday that the United States will be pulling out of the Paris Agreement, an effort initiated on our behalf by the Obama Administration in 2015, because he feels it doesn’t give the United States a fair advantage on the global stage. Sometimes being a leader isn’t a fair game.

Participation in the Paris Agreement is completely voluntary. Canceling the United States’ participation in this agreement is symbolic at best. Hopefully, Trump spent too much of his political capital with this latest distraction stunt to further erase any hopes of him being re-elected for a second term in 2020. Realistically I doubt that he’ll make it to 2018 in the Oval Office, let alone 2020. Though, admittedly I have underestimated the stupidity of the general population and I will probably continue to do so. Optimism and all that.

The Maple Ridge Wind Farm can generate power for about 140,000 homes. With 195 Vesta turbines placed over 75 square miles of land in Lewis County, the wind farm has an installed output of 321 megawatts of power. The wind farm surrounds some farm land of relatives on the paternal side of my family. It’s about 45 miles north of our home. With all the talk about renewable energy this week I went up and parked the Jeep in the Visitors’ Center parking lot, listening to the wind turn the turbine situated closest to the center.  

Admittedly, the turbines are large and definitely a part of the landscape. There’s no escaping them, so I understand why folks would be hesitant to live near these fairly recent additions to the Tug Hill Plateau. But looking at the bright side, there’s no smog, no toxins being released into the air and no threat of a nuclear meltdown.

Just the whisper of clean energy being produced by a renewable resource. Somewhere nearby, 140,000 homes were able to light up their evening because of these guys doing their thing with the wind.

And I find that to be absolutely amazing.

Let’s keep the momentum moving forward. Even if we don’t have to do it, let’s want to make our planet, our only home, the cleanest it can be. Let’s not be selfish.

Let’s give more than we take.

Earl and I have been working on cleaning out our storage areas throughout the house in preparation for our move to Chicago later this year. Earl has been leading this charge and every day he is tackling a closet or a cupboard or a long forgotten drawer. This weekend we worked together to disassemble some of my extraneous geek toys in the “server room” in the basement.

We are probably the only house on the block that had a server rack holding two servers and two file servers with plenty of storage space. The two servers were old computers that had been repurposed for server use – one of the computers was date stamped 1996. An IBM Personal Workstation, it was a Pentium II/233 running Linux. Its task was to flip relays to run the clock system collection wired throughout the house. On the wall was a much newer master clock designed specifically for that task but I liked the idea of flipping relays via a program I had written. I relented and moved the control over to the master clock and decommissioned the ancient computer.

The second server was an old point of sale terminal from an auto parts store repurposed to run Linux and provide “gateway access” to the network at the house. With today’s technology there are much better ways to get to our home network, so I decommissioned that server as well.

The two file servers provide backup capabilities for our computers when we are connected to the home network. They also hold the hundreds of hours of flight and other video I’ve taken with the GoPros. All of our music and photos are also backed up on these two file servers. This evening I went around collecting other external drives I had hooked up to various devices in the house and centralized all the storage.

We now have nearly 20 TB of file storage in the house. It’ll take a lot of downloading to fill up that space. The hard drives are divided up between two little file servers designed specifically for this purpose. One day I’d like to take all the hard drives out of their enclosures and install them in a Drobo 5N2 so that everything is completely centralized and redundant.

Earl can live with one little box sitting in the corner of our new home instead of a big server rack sitting in the basement.

My life as an IT guy is never done.

It’s a given that there’s been major leaps in technology over the past few decades. While computers have been around for my entire lifetime, it wasn’t until I was an adult that technology started coming into every aspect of our lives. I remember the excitement I had about technology when our local grocery store converted from big mechanical cash registers to relatively compact (for the time) electronic cash registers. These didn’t have scanning or anything, everything was categorized as it had been on the mechanical predecessors (Grocery, Produce, Meat, etc), but they could handle fractions, compute sales tax, weigh produce and had enough memory to store the price of a few items in their memory. Management could pull reports. And these little electronic marvels printed receipts that many folks could understand. There were no frills, a message, a list of the items and the total, amount tendered and change due. Thank you and please call again.

Here’s a sample receipt from my senior year in high school.

This receipt from Zayre lists five items, tax due and the aforementioned important points that should be listed on a receipt. Seasons Greetings from Zayre. Easy peasy. The receipt is maybe two inches long, tops. The customer can match the numbers to the numbers on the item. There’s no paper waste. Fun fact, when I was writing code for a temp job at a department store, we made it a challenge to use a little receipt paper as possible, printing the “header” of the next sale as the paper from the current sale was being ejected. We wanted to save paper and save the store money.

Now, here’s a photo grabbed from some random guy on the Internet. It captures the receipt that was spewed out of a modern CVS cash register when he purchased a pack of gum.

Why on earth does a receipt need to be nearly two feet long for the purchase of one item? Who uses all these coupons? How many times do one need to see the store logo? Why do retail establishments feel they need to hammer me over the head with countless marketing messages from one purchase? Why the waste? What happened to be eco-safe and emissions free?

Just because technology allows us to spew yards of paper at a rapid pace out of computerized cash register doesn’t mean that we have to do it. Who is this benefitting? The only positive result from this ridiculousness is the benefit to the paper company. How much of this paper is being wasted? How many trees are being cut to print out six CVS coupons for a pack of gum.

This is not the direction I thought we’d be going in the 21st century. I really believe that technology is ahead of the general IQ of the population. We are capable of doing incredible things but we are literally wasting our bandwidth on stupid stuff.

I know I sound like I’m chasing kids off my lawn but we really need to keep our use of technology reasonable and in perspective. Stop wasting paper.

So Earl and I are avid viewers of “Shark Tank”. I’ve always been partial to episodes that include Barbara Corcoran as one of the sharks (I like the way she thinks, she’s way outside of the box and that’s awesome) and last night we caught up on the season finale off the DVR.

Some of the products pitched on the show get my attention and last night one of the pitches was for Rocketbook, specifically the Rocketbook Wave.

Photo from monstersandcritics.com

The Rocketbook Wave is a notebook designed to be reusable. Using a Pilot Flexion pen, you take notes like you would in any regular notebook. Using a free app on your iPhone, you can then instantly transfer those notes to the cloud service of your choice. It’s a “system” and it’s a well thought out system at that. When you’re done, you then microwave the notebook and all of the pages are erased. You can then use the notebook over again.

That’s pretty nifty.

Here’s a video explaining it.

I am always torn between writing my notes in a notebook, because writing things down by hand helps me remember things and keeping all of my notes digitally. I don’t like wasting paper and I don’t like having to refer back to notebooks. I’ve tried writing notes by hand on my iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil, but it doesn’t feel natural to me and this “artificial pen and paper” distracts from the task of writing something down to remember it. So naturally I went ahead and ordered a Rocketbook Wave directly from their website.

If you use this link to get to their website, you’ll get a special deal.

Rocketbook Referral Deal.

I’m looking forward to my Rocketbook Wave and pen set arriving in the next few days. I’ll be posting a follow-up blog entry to let you know how successful I am with this note taking system that is ecologically friendly.

Now, my only question is, where do I get Jake’s sunglasses? They are very Pretinama.

Today I worked from our friends’ house. As a digital nomad I’ve come across slow Internet during my travels over the past couple of years, but I was confident that things would fly right along on their DSL connection. They have the fastest connection available to their home outside of Durham, N.C. 

After struggling with simple file uploads early in the day I ran a test using Speedtest.net. The fastest connection available here, outside of Durham N.C., tested at 5 Mbps down and .66 Mbps up. The sad thing is, the provider of this DSL is a former employer.

People, it’s the 21st century. We should be looking at 100 Mbps as a minimum. Other modern civilizations look at gigabit speeds and here we are crawling along at 5 Mbps down.

A first world problem, right? Probably. But, man, it’s the 21st century.

Microsoft announced a new Surface Laptop today. It’s basically described as the MacBook Air that Apple doesn’t make anymore and honestly, this description is dead on. Take a look at their marketing video.

https://youtu.be/74kPEJWpCD4

Now, I’m not one to jump on the “Apple is doomed” bandwagon that so many pundits like to chant, but I will freely admit that Apple, and their Mac hardware, is starting to feel stale. I’ve heard many Apple folks say that users don’t want to really touch their screens, but I’ve noticed folks browsing in any given Apple store immediately touch the screen of a MacBook, expecting some sort of response. We are rapidly moving to a touchy-feely world when it comes to our technology, and I don’t think touchbars are the answer. Having everything respond to touch is where the answer lies.

I started browsing around the other Microsoft videos on YouTube and came across the one about the new Surface Book with Performance Base. This does everything I would expect a computer in 2017 to do. My only hesitation is Windows 10 and part of that hesitation stems from ignorance, I don’t know a lot about Windows 10 other than the stuff thrown all over the web, and how reliable is information on the Internet these days?

Color me intrigued.

Sometimes we need a little wit in our lives. It all leads to Happy Endings.

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I caught this on Reddit this evening. It’s a YouTube video discussing how much darker the movie “Passengers” would be like if they rearranged the acts. An intriguing approach. I have to admit I liked “Passengers”, even for all its flaws, but I think I would be very interested in seeing a rearranged cut of the movie as described in this video.

I no longer shy away from the label of “Apple Fanboy”. I’m a Crazy One. I love my Apple products. I’ve tried everything else and lord knows I’ve wretched about Apple over the years, but when you shake away all the complaining, the fact of the matter is I find that Apple still provides the best computing experience available. Other hardware pales in comparison. Windows 10 feels cobbled together to me. And, as much as I’ve tried, I just can’t get behind the idea of Linux on the desktop (or laptop). That is way too much work.

So I wear my Crazy One t-shirt in pride. I proudly gave a presentation at work this morning using my work provided 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display, including the couple of dongles I needed to connect to the projector and network. There was an ooh and aah from the crowd as I made my way through my Keynote Presentation. It had that extra bit of polish that I strive for.

I look forward to what Apple has in store for us. I know they will continue to delight.