From Ye Old Blogge: Friday, September 01, 2006 Passing Milestones

merely moan

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Passing Milestones

(and not in your water, either!)

Some major milestones have slid quietly closer and closer and then fallen away astern for me, some almost unnoticed. Some other milestones are looming pretty intensely, and some you just want to forget.

Last Saturday, (26th August) the first milestone that slid beneath the billows of time was the publication of my diet book online. I was rather ill that week, but this was the one thing I managed to achieve that I was most proud of. As a result of that effort, people around the world with "slow inflammation" based illnesses (and this includes several cancers including the one I designed the diet for, prostate cancer) will be able to give these horrible illnesses a run for their money. For me, it reversed my prostate problems in seven months and saved me from the risks involved in the surgery. On all counts, I'm glad I got the thing to publication.

The next milestone that derived from that is that I went from being an unpaid writer to being a published author. Published author! Okay this is very akin to being vanity press but it's still publication. I almost missed this in the excitement, and it was only the other day that it finally penetrated my consciousness. Wow...

What wasn't immediately obvious from that is the other hat I began wearing - I am now also a publisher. The difference between vanity press printing and publishing is that printing involves only taking a marked-up text and setting it in print. Publishing involves choosing the manuscript, editing it, marking it up, getting it printed, and publicising (that's where the "pub" in publishing comes in after all) and selling the finished product. If I only turned the text into an e-book I'd have been a glorified electronic printer, but I've also done the first publicising of the product by putting it online, and have the advertising and publicity plan coming together and launching this weekend. So I'm a printer/publisher now as well.

Apropos of which, I've decided that I'll assist other health/diet/lifestyle/recipe/DIY/home_improv authors by getting them into e-publication and letting them sell their wares on the zencookbook site - may as well act like a real publisher I guess. Also, more titles will equate to more useful information in one place, and that will mean that we all benefit. So if you know someone with a good idea for a book, or with a manuscript, which they want to put online using e-book format, get them to email me teddlesruss(AT)hotmail(DOT)com and I'll help them get it happening.

This Thursday (31 August) another milestone hove into sight and zipped by. As well as becoming a published author, I'm now a *paid* published author. Yep, the first copy of The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook sold online Thursday morning and made my day... That's within less than six days of publication, and without any advertising. Gotta love the Internet!

And since it's now September, I can also say that another milestone cruised in almost under the radar, being that this blog surpassed 1,000 hits in a month, at 1056 for the month of August. That's this suite of blog pages, nothing to do with the diet book, which hit its own high water mark of 35 hits a day yesterday as well, and I haven't even begun to advertise it yet.

Upcoming milestones:
I'd rather forget, but in another six weeks it will be the anniversary of my biopsy that showed the high level of deformed cells.

Six months from now also sees me hitting the half century mark, and should also see results from the CSIRO tests of the diet.

All in all it's been a pretty good week for milestones.

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.

From Ye Old Blogge: Wednesday, November 19, 2003 What my parents said about the festive season...

Memory Lane

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

What my parents said about the festive season...

Thirty years ago, I first heard my parents say "Christmas is so commercialised these days!" and, being only a little tacker in those days, I just couldn't see how such a magical time could be thought of as commercialised.

Now I'm older and wiser, and I know where all those presents under the tree come from, and hell if I don't believe my parents finally... I saw an ad for a women's magazine on the TV the other evening, and it included ' your five free gold stars' and an article about ' how to use your free gold stars to add a personal touch to your Christmas ' inside it. And I started thinking about all that, and opened a whole can of worms in the process...

For example - gold stars. Cost next to nothing, just gold covered card cut on a press, and honestly, even as a kid I would have been offended to be offered such crap, even for free that's just plain snake-oil salesmanship... Sort of like a handful of blue glass beads only cheaper...

And having insulted their entire readership (who, come to think of it, probably deserve the insult, because they're obviously still buying that patronising, cheap drivel rag) they then use that gift as a way to fill up a couple of extra pages. I mean, what can you do to 'personalise' your Christmas with five gold stars which are as depersonalised as you can get? Stick them to something, same as the other 800,000 readers of the magazine who after all got the same gift and the same article? Argh, give us a break!

That's the commercialism part covered. Now for the obligatory 'back in de good old days' whinge:
My mother was probably a halfway houseproud woman, but she didn't go to extraordinary lengths to 'personalise Christmas' either, we used off the shelf streamers garlands and tinsel and decorations. Even back then, the only people who had the time or resources to 'personalise' their Christmas were bored affluent wives of high-income earners, and they added the personal touch because it was missing in their lives. Nowadays, even less people have the time and resources to go to any great lengths to add personal touches.

Most people will use their off the shelf bits just as they've been doing for thirty years, and have the same 'commercial' trees as everyone else, the same 'commercial' decorations, and (probably) sigh and complain bitterly about how commercial Christmas has become...

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.

From Ye Old Blogge: Tuesday, November 18, 2003 Smart phones dumb bunnies

marley omen

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

Smart phones dumb bunnies

Here's a cute story. Smart phones fox frustrated users - go ahead, go read it, it's a hoot - that has me thinking again.

The story claims that smart phones are too hard for their owners to work out. Awwww, poor dumb bunnies... One of the quotes I love most:

Intuwave points out that configuring the e-mail function on the SonyEricsson P800 involves 12 separate parameters. A mistake in just one of these can scupper any chance of using the device to send and receive mail.

Setting up an ordinary email program involves around the same or even more parameters. How do these jerks get their email anyway? Oh, I see - AOL...

'There is a huge gap here,' he said, 'and it's high time we saw a mobile care revolution.'

Gee I wonder where precisely that gap is?

These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

Title should be: From Ye Old Blogge

I started a new blog.

Yeah, I know - mad bastard. As if I don't have enough to do already...

So now I have Tis Not Today as well. It's a memoir-style blog with stuff from my past which you might find as amusing (or not, sometimes...) as I did when living through it. I had some interesting times, some great times, and a few not-so-great times. But I'll share them over the next year or two of writing.

As you may know, I write a lot of blog posts every week. We're talking sometimes a few days of researching and writing, and it takes me a fair bit of time. As well as that I do a lot of other things - work on ways to recycle waste materials, mostly plastic but I'm also getting into thin metals, textiles, food waste, and looking at a few more as I go. I also do my share of the household work, keep a vegetable garden for us, do craft and handyman projects, electronic projects, 3D printing projects, and loads more.

You can help me to keep server and online fees paid, help me source some of the materials I use to research and make projects, and generally let me know you appreciate my time and efforts. Please use the graphic above to donate, subscribe to my once-a-week newsletter, or contact me to chat.

Because, I do keep a lot of blogs running. Here's the list:

BFZCB TEdALOG LiteII TEdAMENU Tuckertime TEdADYNE Systems O Hai Corona Grumpy Old Guy PTEC3D News Tis Not Today

You can also help me by sharing links to articles you liked, every share is a bit more reach and helps get the posts seen by even more people. 

Only a short post this time, just wanting to let you know about the memoirs blog. See you there!

Ye Olde Blogge Poste, Tuesday, November 18, 2003

No Mery Lame

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled. There seem to have been two posts this particular Tuesday:

Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Now this I REALLY hate!

Scientific American, take a walk of shame for this piece of crap reportage - fancy going through an entire article whose entire raison d'etre is to let us know that scientists now know the temperature of formation of DNA - AND THEN DON'T FUCKING REPORT WHAT THOSE TEMPERATURES ACTUALLY ARE!

Do yourselves a favour SciAm, and fire *name withheld* who 'reported' (if that term can be applied to such a lightweight piece of crap) this item...

Spinnerets

Hmmm. Just saw this on Science Daily - Discovery Could Lead To New Ways To Create Nano-fibers And Wires - and now I'm thinking:

Do spiders spin their silk like this? Multiple strands of ultrathin strands solidified together? Go read the article then come back.

Okay? They form a droplet inside a viscous liquid and then solidify it using light, then snap it off. A bit like:

=- --------------------------------------------------------------- --<)

^Nozzle, breaks off here, then a loooong thin thread, then a break and the droplet ^. Scuse the bad artwork...

Now suppose that spiders generate a lot of such threads inside their mysterious spinnerets. Suppose that instead of using light to solidify their threads, the 'viscous liquid' turns out to have the exact right properties to solidify the thin threads, provided they are extruded at the right speed. 

Getting a picture? If you did this continuously, you'd end up with microfilaments with 'bumps' every so often along their length, which would be the droplets. If the spinnerets jets work together, you could produce a fibre which is 'locked' together by those bumps, which consists of many microfibres, and if the viscous fluid is also adhesive, it sticks the strands together with surface tension.

I'll collect my prize when they discover that this is precisely how spiders do it. I'm confident.

These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

Fifty Years of the Internet And Mobile Phones

This is a relatively quick and easy article to write. The first mobile phone call was made just over fifty years ago on April 3, 1973. The Internet is almost fifty-five years old. This is August 2023 in the 21st Century. 

Bear in mind, the first transcontinental phone call, amplified by thermionic valves that made a coast to coast call in the USA possible, was made only 58 years ealier in 1915. Not even sixty years passed between phone calls that could barely be heard up to 1200km distance, to transcontinental distances,  to intercontinental calls over Telstar satellites, to mobile phones. -- sidenote. Look up the provided links... 

I'm sitting at a large older monitor plugged into a venerable and ancient laptop typing this on a wireless keyboard, with a bluetooth earpiece in my ear listening to music and podcasts via a Samsung mobile phone. We have subscriptions to several streaming services that we access on a smart TV running Android. 

All these devices are the progeny of ENIAC which became one of the first general-purpose computers in 1945, but Herman Hollerith developed the first machine that tabulated by punched cards in the 1870s, and Vannemar Bush developed electric/electronic calculating machines in the 1930s. 

The DEC PDP11 was a good machine for its day, and in 1994 I was lucky enough to get hold of one that was in a 4ft (old school measurements, yes) fully enclosed rack cabinet with a smoked glass door,and consisted of a CPU (in the Wikipedia image, the thing with the row of keyswitches near the bottom of the rack) in the middle, a few power control switches and an output panel at the top, and a high speed paper tape punch/reader for storing and loading programs into it just under the CPU. It was very impressive in my flat, taking up the space of two bar fridges on top of each other as it did. It was also plugged in and fully working, and I'd painstakingly cut a paper tape that sequentially lit the panel lights and clicked the power control relays occasionally. It also dimmed the lights momentarily when I turned it on, and an observant friend noticed that it made lights flicker ever so slightly in sync with the running program. Today, my mobile phone is several orders of magnitude more powerful and runs for several days on a li-ion battery. Needless to say, the PDP11 only got switched on when I had visitors I wanted to impress.. -- my braggy sidenote

The first 3D printing equipment - 1980s. Reprap ("I am your father, modern 3D Printers!") was a fairly recent 2005. Compare and contrast with a Bambulabs P1S which is pretty much the acme of home 3D printing and came along just under two years after its progenitor the X1 Carbon. (By the way, if anyone wanted to shout me a P1-P or P1S I wouldn't say no. Just sayin'...)

It just made me want to produce a graphic. All my graphics can be bought at full size and without text or URL tag, just contact me

I'm also looking at a series of 3D-printed items - a caddy for holding several external disk drives, a few other tools and assistive things I printed for us. If I need a tool or have a problem - I can make what I need. We have lids to save partially used tins and tubs of tomato paste, the cats have dishes with raised ridges on the bottom to allow them to get their cat kibbles easily, and there are some "stuff organisers" in the bathroom mirror cabinet to keep about fifty small items - organised - and easy to find.

The future really IS all around us.

It'd be a pity if some kind of climate crisis spoiled all that future... 

EDIT: I found a few more things that say "the-future-is-here" to me, loud and clear. First up is a "pin" (I guess a brooch style pin from context, because the picture included could be anything, really) made by ex-Apple employees that acts as a voice-activated AI assistant and, while it purports to sort of get out the way of life and be unobtrusive it seemingly needs you to hold up a hand to see a projected display, which I'd find weird if someone was facing me and suddenly held up a hand and started at their palm. Not sure if it can do audio too but then does it just blurt your answer out or do you need to still wear an earpiece?

Don't get me wrong - it's the sort of tech I'd kill for but I think it's a solution looking for a problem. I already have a mobile phone that does all of that, and people have become used to them in the fifty years that we've had them and the thirty-five years that they've become a mainstream device. If they could really make the tech get right out of the way I'd be on it like white on rice though... 

Too soon to tell if this is the next killer device but fingers crossed.

Second thing is more geeky even than that first one - if that's possible, and I think you'll agree with me when you read this that it is. It's an optical network on a chip and it promises (to me, anyway, as I read the article) that pretty soon the capacity to run a massive AI program in a slot of your desktop PC. I just know that this Optical NoC will be shrunk and shrunk down and finally it'll reside on your probably quite large mobile phone - and when it is, it'll eat Humane's lunch. 

And maybe *this* time I can hit enter on the article and let it stay scheduled... 

EDIT: Nope - I had to edit again, this time to add the paragraph below the lede about telphone communications to give an idea of how fast the technology developed; and to add the sidenote about my PDP11 in my pokey little flat in the 1990s. (Sidenote to that sidenote: I also had four conventional tower case servers of some sort (that were tall enough to lay a large panel door across to form a big and handy workbench/workdesk) that had power supplies so hefty that I once used one of them to arc weld outside just to prove the point to a doubting friend when he asked why I didn't power all my old 'puters up together to have a really great display. Kenny, as I said back then there ain't no household fuse panel can supply that much juice without catching fire... Also, the tower servers were some weird brand I was only really keeping for the power supplies for other projects. - And the fact that they made for a very interesting workbench/desk unit... )

(Oh more - I also had a huge-ass ASR-33 style teletype, a carton of blank paper tape, and - for a while - the entire stage sound setup of a band with a head rack and effects rack I built for them out of their gear, a 24 channel front of house mixer desk, and the speaker stacks. And yes the tiny living/dining room also held a couch, TV, a decent stereo, and several computers like a VIC-20, C64, and am Amstrad CPC464 with disk drives, much of it interconnected so the stereo provided a bit more oomph for games and demos. To say my neighbours probably hated me at times might be an understatement... 😸 - - - I might throw together some memoirs sometime.)

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From Ye Olde Blogge #4 Sunday, January 18, 2004

Rome My Lane

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

There are a LOT of mini posts on this Sunday! I must have rolled them up from a list. (And I did - the process of text->HTML->text into the text dumps stripped a lot of stuff out as I recall.)

Why are brains in the head?

Another biological mystery. Among hundreds...

Many animals, and all known plants, get along without a brain at all. That's a known fact, we have animals like earthworms which don't have centralised hearts and certainly no brains, yet they live. Their hearts are a bunch of nodes along their bodies which just massage their internal juices around, and their nervous systems connect in such a way that there's no 'control centre' anywhere, it's just distributed among the nerve junctions.

Similarly, all the plants we know of have no intelligence that we're aware of, and don't have anything we could call a nervous system as we understand that term. Yet they too live, and we're now not quite so sure anymore that they aren't as aware as, say, an earthworm - they certainly react to their environment, and it's been shown that they react to threats and somehow communicate this to others of their species nearby. Hence, my unwillingness to state categorically that plants don't have brains or at least primitive distributed complexes...

Insects, invertebrates, and plants - they form the vast majority of the biomass on this planet, and most of them seem to do that without needing a brain. In many ways, life gets along far better if it just has no brains, just little biological machines chugging away. Brains just seem to disturb the balance...

So okay, let's get that framed a bit better. Have you ever wondered why we find nature so beautiful? We're born into a whole world full of nature, and then we wonder why we find the only thing we know, the thing that sustains us and nurtures us and provides our only impressions of beauty, beautiful? There's a name for this phenomenon but it just escapes me for the moment. Sort of "QED, now let's test for it and - surprise! - QED!" What it means for the purposes of my discussion is that we rate the success of lifeforms on a profoundly different scale than, say, that earthworm.

To us, intelligence and adaptability are indicators of success. Our brains are what makes us the successful, world-dominating, all niche exploiting, most successful lifeform we've ever known. A large part of what we perceive to be our evolutionary success, is due to those largish lumps of gray matter in our heads, our brains. Without that brain, we'd actually be wiped out by any suitably hungry colony of cave bats or field mice. Minus that pound of not-quite-flesh, we would not survive even if the mice and bats and every damn thing kept their distance as a mark of respect for the late kings. We would starve to death in our idiot bodies.

Hang on - we keep our single most mission-critical organ on an external, sticky-outy fragile bone box? Isn't that a bit silly? Shouldn't we be keeping it right next to our hearts, in a bony box deep in the middle of our bodies? Where the most layers separate it from damage by the big wide external world we supposedly rule? So what went wrong here? Why did this retrograde step happen?

Yep, if you're a four-legged prone animal with a Large Brain, then that's the part which is furthest away from whatever is chasing you. And if you're a four-limbed bipedal animal then it places the Large Brain way above (one would hope) harm's way from attack by ground provided the crittur attacking us is A) on the ground and B) not another four-limbed bipedal animal with a Large Brain intent on bashiing our Large Brain out with the Tool which it's Large Brain just invented...

And similarly, when our prone friend attacks a foe, their large Brain is now at the forefront and most prone to Retaliatory Attack By Other. So I don't get it... Why did Large Brains In Bone Boxes On The End Of Spindly Sticks become the flavour of the aeon? I imagine that the distance from the Bulging Eyes and Large Flappy Ears to the Large Wobbly Brain had to be kept as short as possible to allow us to process input more quickly, because that's an admirable survival trait, to be able to size up a situation quicker than the opposition and then act on it.

But - here's the kicker - now that we've assessed the situation, we realise the Other is much bigger and fiercer than we are - and we now have a problem. Yes, we saw the outcome much quicker than the hypothetical Other With A Large Brain further from their sense organs, but - ... dammit, now we have to wait for the signal to travel from our brain to our legs, and start Evasive Running-Away Manoeuvres 101... Almost as far as if the brain had been in that superbly protected position in the middle of our bodies. We might have lost a few nanaseconds of time for the brain to react, but we gained those nanoseconds in the reduced time it would take for our RUN!!! reaction to reach our legs...

Just like I'm not convinced by men's nipples and other things, the Large Brains In Bone Boxes On The End Of Spindly Sticks doesn't quite convince me either. We're a whole evolutionary system gone wrong, we are, not just one branch of the tree...

So - given that we seem to be built entirely wrong, that we destroy more ecosystem than we contribute, and that 95% of the world's biomass would consider us (if they had Large Brains) a Bad Aberration in the evolutionary course, what precisely are we?

I assume we're a lucky guess, a system that came about by accident and which worked, albeit always to the detriment of the overall system, but it did work. We're now fulfilling our mission, which is to rid the world of all troublesome 'others' and we're succeeding quite well at that, what with the species extinction rate. 'Bang on target, old man, good work!" and all that. We will probably eventually succumb to an Amoebic Entity With No Reasoning Power Whatsoever, and then Life will resume it's pleasant plodding course.

I'd still like to see a lifeform designed by Something With A Smart Brain though...

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one.

I'm shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

From Ye Olde Blogge #3 Sunday January 18, 2004

MyRome Lane

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

THIS WEEK: Eerie echoes of the future and COVID-19. Wow.

The conspiracy theory that dares not speak... - something... umm...

I'm saying SARS. I'm saying AIDS. Can you say "tailored," dear reader?

Why was I looking at a news item the other day which stated that a possible reason SARS was so successful in Asia is because Asian people have a particular genetic trait which SARS can latch onto? It just seemed so - convenient - that this virus would cause us less collateral damage than another, competing-for-the-world's-resources, racial genotype...

How did I bring AIDS into this? Well, it's another virus that targets specific groups, although this one does it via another mechanism. But the group it targets are people who won't be mixing it up in the gene pool, or else it gets to people who can't easily avoid or treat it, i.e. African people. And I'm almost willing to bet that someday very soon, some scientist somewhere will spot another "genetic hook" in this virus.

I don't claim to be politically correct. Life (no matter how many nanny-staters say otherwise) will never be politically correct, it'll always pursue its own course, which is to weed out political correctness and the nice guys and the not-quite-guys and... well, you get the idea...
It's just that... well... dammit, I am NOT a conspiracy nut but these things seems so... so... convenient... Bugger, now I've said it...

The world is shrinking, resource-wise. No-one can argue with it anymore, we are cleaning it up as fast as we humanly can, and therein lies the rub: Who will end up inheriting what's left? Yes yes, the "nice" folk would have you all sit arm in arm around the campfire but be honest, do you think it's gonna happen? Uh-uh...

And I can hear someone asking how the heck we could have developed AIDS before we cracked the genetic code. In fact, how SARS could be targeted at a genetic loophole so quickly after the genetic code was opened. So I'm going to digress for a moment.

When I was a much younger pup, I read about lasers and how they were going to develop lasers and I was amazed. They developed lasers, and I was amazed some more. Then I read in an electronics magazine that someone had theorised that a magnetic field could be amplified and used to fuse wiring and electronic devices, and I mentioned this to a retired technician friend of mine. "That sounds like project Green Ray" he said. When I asked him more about this, he said that he'd worked on a magnetic pulse weapon in the Air Force some 20 - 30 years earlier

In other words, it took around 25 years for mainstream Defense technology to make it into mainstream civilian technology. So when exactly did genetic work first come to the point where it could become useful for targeting virii at specific groups? Ah-hah, ah-ha...

Then too, look at how scattershot AIDS is compared to SARS. AIDS did it's selection by using circumstances against particular groups, who have become the target group by virtue of economic disability. SARS is more refined, but hmmm... Targets, say, North Koreans, does it? Or Iraqis? Not too far away is it?

Pass the gene-splicer lads, I need to get rid of this tribe in the middle of Australia here!

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. 

I'm also shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world. 

From Ye Olde Blogge #2, Sunday, January 18, 2004

Memory Lane

Some old pre-Blogspot.com posts, recycled.

ALSO: On this day in 2020 after I'd spent money on a new Lenovo Ideapad laptop/tablet combo, she finally arrived and I unpacked: Leni the Lenovo. She rarely gets used in tablet mode but when she does, I'm very glad to have a Win10 tablet I can carry around and use via touchscreen swipes and an on-screen keyboard. Also - it's great to be able to type, 'mouse' around using the touchpad, and then just tap a thing on the screen to select / activate. ALL laptops and PC screens should have this by now! It's just a way better way of working.  

TechnoFRZ - why weenies will never work out...

(I received this from a friend who works in IT as the sole IT guy in an office of - look, I'll let them take it from here:)

I'm about to work twice as hard at work, because we have a techno-weenie, an OS FRZ... (Fanatical Religious Zealot to those of you who missed the heyday of acronyms.)

And why? Because we both look after the same network, from different offices. We're connecting a company that's striving for that elusive first WAN, and we have different approaches. I tend to use what the company wants, for the sake of the company's network, while he tends to want to make the company use what he prefers, on *his* network... It's not going to work for him, on a lot of levels, and I think you can see why.

Being an Admin in a company means that you have a slightly different customer focus than the rest of the company. The company are there for the clients - you're there for the company... While my opposite number is in head office trying to change us to his idea of a perfect networking solution, I'm happy to provide whatever our customers are using so that our sales and tech support people are talking the same language as our customers. He has the company's Big Boss's ear, I have the interests of the whole company at heart - can you see who's going to win?

Our company made software which was revolutionary for it's heyday, which pushed the envelope and needed Silicon Graphics' finest just to run. As computing power ramped up, our software got a complete facelift into the 20th century by being fully ported to Windows. The reason? Our clients' networks have gone to Windows, and keeping a few SGI boxen around was becoming too cumbersome.
So now all our customers are all switched, and my oppo has switched as much of the network as he can to Linux and OS software... Why are our programmers and developers, who've just gotten used to Visual Basic and the Evil Way being asked to use gcc again? Well, at his office site, anyway...

Meanwhile, we have a decent MS based network, and a VPN based (as it should be) on *nix firewalls. I like to use what's appropriate, not something I'm devoted to. If you have favourites, you won't be touting them long unless they happen to agree with the needs of the company, if you stick to those favourites then you'll be outgrown when your company outgrows the technology.

I don't want to weigh in right now on the value or otherwise of sticking with one company for extended periods of employment. I'll just say that I think if you can stick with one company for a decent period, I'll respect you more because I consider that you've grown with that company and thus have shown dedication, ability to learn, and must have some measure of something which enabled you to keep your job. I'd hope that one of those "somethings" would have been the ability to adjust to the needs of your organisation...

(Note: The IT guy who sent me this is as far as I know still working there as I'm posting this story. He sent it to me early 2003.)

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These are random blog posts I recently rescued from a text dump of my earliest recorded blog posts from Ye Good Ole Days of writing stuff in Notepad and using some weird software that basically uploaded your entire blog every time you added a new article or edited an old one. I am shamelessly adding that little mini-banner graphic with links for you to donate, check my newsletter site, and generally get more entangled in my weird world.