OH yes they call him The Streak

Well look at that - no posts for over a year then two in a week.

I just wanted to drop a quick note here that I charged my iPad at work today and noticed when I looked at the home screen that the alerts that were popping up were all for last week. Looks like the Streak is really taking over for the iPad. I am starting to wonder if the iPad is destined to be passed down to one of the kids shortly. As for the charging cable - well I guess we will have to ait and see It is a PDMI cable, part of a hopefully new and emerging standard. Perhaps the next big thing or perhaps the next 8-track.

Went to the Yankees ALDS clincher on Saturday night (sweep!). It occurred to me that it just is not worth the price of the drive there. Between the traffic, the gas, the tolls and the parking, it is easier to buy my wife a round trip train ticket and 4 subway fairs and take the little extra time and save close to $50. I mean damn - during the regular season that could pay for a pair of tickets up in nosebleed seas or with the Bleacher Creachers.

Getting back into the swing of things at home with only one kid in the house. Seems strange. Starting to understand why some parents have another kid later in life. Not going to happen with us though. I wouldn't mind retiring early though. Hear that Lottery Commission! :)

Moving on...

It has been a long time since my last post here - over a year in fact. I guess I just have not felt like it. My last post was shortly after the death of my brother-in-law and was probably dark and depressing. My wife was not working and I had probably just ended or was about to end working at a position I had really liked but which had been decimated by layoffs.

Now it is Autumn, 2010 - a daughter in college and a son in high school plus a wife once again gainfully employed. I am at a great company who loves open source and takes excellent care of their employees, the Yankees have made the post season and I have tickets for Saturday's game. In the toys department I purchased an iphone4 the day it became available and an ipad on day one as well. Both totally rock and I cannot wait for the jailbreak for IOS4. I use both on a daily basis as I once again have my long-ass commute to Manhattan.

The new toy is a Dell Streak. Dell released it this past Friday and shipped one to me overnight on that same day so it reached me yesterday. Upon opening it the first thing I noticed was the size. All I could think of was: WTF?!? Too big for a phone and too small for a tablet. It occurs to me that had I neither iphone nor ipad, this one unit would be an interesting compromise. Let's face it - a good chunk of the calls we make these days are done with the help of ear buds with a mic or a bluetooth headset of some sort, so it being larger than a phone is not a big problem, although I tend to keep my phone in my rear pants pocket - not happening with this thing.

What about using it as a tablet? It is honestly going to take me a while to get used to android. Not that there is anything bad about it, just that I have been using my ipad for months now and I have gotten used to it. Everythign is different, including aiming for the buttons. With the ipad you have to aim low - with this thing you have to aim high, so I keep missing.

The big disappointment with the Streak in Android 1.6. Seriously Dell? 1.6 in late 2010? Fortunately there is an active hacking community that sent me to a program that lets me feed images to the streak and told me how to put the streak into the mode to accept those images. So I loaded the O2 (UK cell phone carrier) image of Eclaire (Android 2.1) onto the SD card in the root as Update.pkg, put the Dell restore image onto my mac, ran the loader program, put the Streak into loading mode (turn on while holding the camera button), loaded the image, turned it off, turned it on holding both the volume up and volume down keys which tells it to look for Update.pkg at the root of the SD card, loaded the update and *poof* - upgraded.

Dell tells me the Froyo (Android 2.2) will be pushed OTA to the devices before the end of the year, probably before Thanksgiving, so I will probably have to do this all again to load the Android 1.6 image back on so the Streak thinks it is once again an AT&T device, but for now 2.1 is far better than 1.6. I have loaded apps, played music and videos, surfed the web - all work nicely.

The videos work out very nicely on the 5" 800x480 screen. I think that if I need to go on a trip and do not feel like packing ton of tech, I'll just swap my SIM into the streak and take that with me.

The real drawback? The lack of cheap third party charging cables.

This summer sucked. R.I.P Blaire Newton

August is over and we are into September. What was a great Spring rapidly turned into a really crappy Summer. The entire month of July was cold, and I spent it looking forward to the trip on Israel for Wade's Bar Mitzvah at the end of August. We got to Israel with only a minor bit of butt pain from sitting so long, dropped the bags off in the one of our 2 hotel rooms that was ready at the Inbal in Jerusalem, did some walking and shopping, bought my kids their first Felafel, met up with my in-laws at the pool, went upstairs to get ready for dinner and to meet up with the tour group when it all came crashing down - my brother-in-law Blaire had died suddenly during our flight over.

We re-booked our flights home, but none were available for abut 36 hours. While Blaire's death is tragic and what it has done to the family, and especially my sister-in-law is sad beyond description, what I will remember for the rest of my life is my son Wade lying on his bed and the look on his face. When we were shopping he bought a kippah that fit him nicely and he truly seemed to feel at home there, seemly as I felt the first time I was there. Now to have it all taken away, along with his Uncle just a few hours after it started.

I myself fell into quite a depression for a couple of weeks. Taking a trip to a water park with my kids, my nephew, his cousin, my cousin's sone and assorted friends, friend's kids the and kids' friends really helped pick up my spirits though. The renaissance faire helped a bit too, although a cannot go there without remembering Blaire and his costume those few years ago when we all used to go camping together for the weekend and go the to the faire for two days, falling asleep in front of the fire at the campground.

To my kids that seems so long ago, but as accumulated memories invariably accelerate subjective time, it seems relatively recent to me.

I was sent a list of concerts that a friend had seen on Facebook recently. That got me thinking about all of the concerts I have seen. I thought that perhaps I would put a similar list into place on here, where I could come back and edit it more easily from time to time. If you were ever at a concert with me and it is not on this list, please feel free to let me know so I can add it.

Alice In Chains
Anderson, Bruford, Wakeman, Howe
Bad Company
Beach Boys
Billy Joel
Billy Squier
Black Sabbath
Blue Oyster Cult (many)
Chicago
CSN (with and without Y)
Candlebox
Cindy Lauper
Creed
David Johanssen (as himself and as Buster Poindexter)
Def Leppard
Dream Theater
Earth Wind & Fire
Elton John
Emerson Lake & Palmer
Eric Clapton
Fish
Fleetwood Mac
Foreigner
Genesis
Godsmack
Good Charlotte
Grand Funk Railroad
Harry Chapin
Hootie & The Blowfish
James Taylor
Jethro Tull
Jimmy Page & The Black Crowes
Joe Perry Project
John Paul Jones
Kansas
King Crimson
Kiss
Limp Bizkit
Lyle Lovett and his large band
Lynyrd Skynyrd
Marillion (many)
Miles Davis
Moody Blues
Neil Innes
Ozzy Osbourne
Pat Benatar
Paul McCartney
Paul Simon
Pearl Jam
Pete Best
Peter & Gordon
Peter Gabriel
Phil Collins
Pink Floyd
Porcupine Tree
Quiet Riot
REM
Rick Wakeman
Rikki Lee Jones
Ringo Starr
Robert Plant
Roger Waters
Rush (many)
Sevendust
Smash Mouth
Smithereens
Spyrogyra
Squeeze
Steely Dan
Steve Hackett
Steven Stills
Stevey-Ray Vaughn
Stone Temple Pilots
Styx
The Clash
The Tubes
The Who
Third Eye Blind
Triumph
Twisted Sister ( / Bad Brother)
UFO
Van Halen
Velvet Revolver
Yes (many)
Zebra (many)

* Note that (many) means so many times I cannot remember, not like Genesis, Robert Plant, Pearl Jam or Peter Gabriel which I have seen around three-four times each 3 times

Wow - am I thriving

I was told this mornign that I thrive I stress. My response was that I must really be thriving!

So the company that I work for is now owned by a private firm. That is both good and bad. The medical coverage sucks, but there is a lot of room to help guide things I am interested in.

Most recently I went through training in Agile development with the whole group here: business, developers, and everyone else you could think about. I cannot tell you how great this is. I do not know that it is for everyone, but so far I love it, and it seems to be working well for us.

If I was only working on that it would be great, however I seem to have fallen into the lead position from the applications standpoint of the move of our system over to a new facility with new hardware. Do you know how people tell you to make lemonade when you are given lemons? I am drowning in the lemonade at this point. But on the bright side, it does all seem to be turning into lemonade.

While all of this is going on at work, this recession is turning out to be a huge boon on the consulting side. This weekend is the big convention for one of our clients that we get stuck attending, so I am prepping computers and my 42" plasma screen for the weekend there, all the while setting up a bunch of virtual servers on a high-end Dell 2850 running VMWare ESX. Good stuff. When linux natively has virtualization like this with KVM or whatever they actuallly end up with, I will be happy to go over to it, but until then this is great!

Child #1 is fencing away, doing trwo days per week in the city now, while taking an SAT prep course alkl on top of all of the AP classes she is taking. Now too much stress there either. Maybe she could actually make the bus one morning?

As for the "little" one, the countdown to the Bar Mitzvah is down in double digits now. I suppose I should start studying my torah portion at some point soon, but why put off to tomorrow what can be put off to next week!

The Programming VP post at the shul is almost done. Shabbat Across America is coming along nicely and attendance is far more than I expected. I hope this goes well!

Then there is the planning for the big trip to Israel this summer. That's sort of my holy grail right now. It has been 25 years since I was there and I cannot wait to get back. Everyone hasd cameras now and we are all practicing with them. Documenting a trip in this day and age is going to be far different than it was in 1980. I write an adventure game for the TRS-80 on the flight home back then. Look it up some time - it is called Jerusalem Adventure and can still be found in the TRS-80 archives.

At the end of the month is fest. I will be tweeting live during the fest as well as doing the webcast. Should be interesting, especially after 7 or 8 drinks in on Saturday night.

Should I ever complain that life is boring, just point me to this post. As for now, am I thriving!

Recession and elipses

It has been almost 7 months now since I last wrote and 11 months on Weight Watchers. My weight is down a total of about 60 lbs. Actually it has been in that area for about 4 months now. I am just trying to survive the holidays - first the Jewish ones, then Thanksgiving (which let's just admit is just an American version of Sukkot) then all this latke stuff coming up and the candy everywhere...

On the home front things are good. I need to get a bunch of things fixed aroudn the house, like the leak from my shower, the gutters and I figure the roof over the den is going to need some work soon. The boy is studying for his Bar Mitzvah, at least when we remind him to. La Nina is fencing away and pissing off her madre at every turn. Having a teenager is fun. Having a teenager is fun. Having a teenager is fun. Just keep repeating that....

Work is... well let's just say there is a lot of it. Management realized that open source is saving them a shitload of money so they other music clubs are shutting down since they have to pay these ridiculous fees for Microsoft or Oracle or whatever Java application server they are running upon. Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl. LAMP. Repeat after me. LAMP.

I have been told my job is quite secure. I have been told a bunch of other things, but they are confidential after all, so I shan't repeat them here. This does sometimes feel like "Dear Diary", but it is public, isn't it?

Wayne and Laura got married a couple of weeks ago. I know this because I performed the ceremony as minister. My first since I was ordained - woohoo! Laura is great - everything one could want in a sister-in-law. She is witty and joyous and most of all she makes my brother happy. It was great to see his boys too. Wayne, if you are reading this, always remember: I may have had a lot to drink, but you are the one who left your wedding cake at the valet parking station! After all, I'm not the one who poured the Scotch. or the Wine, or the other scotch, or maybe it was the Tequila...

An interesting call from the wife from Hong Kong a few weeks ago the she couldn't get on her flight home because her passport was missing made for an interesting day. Fortunately she was able to get all of the paperwork done at the consulate quickly so she came home later the same day.

That pretty much hits the recent highlights. Winter is here early with 3" of snow over the weeken din Huntington - we seem to hae been the high water (snow) level for this one which suited Laura just fine as she had only seen snow like this once before and that was when she was a little girl. Matt and Jenn got a house and a cute new Dachund puppy and we all had breakfast with them on Sunday. Too much eating this weekend. time to go back to concentrating on the diet.

Upgrades

I was completing my profile on linked-in and it asked for my blog link. That made me remember that I have not posted in quite a while. So here we go...

So far this year at work has been about getting the software ready to move to a new hosting facility. We were originally going to go to a zLinux (mainframe) platform, but after running lots of tests and checking ROI, we decided to can that project. If they had listened to me it would have been canned a month earlier.

Of course it was canned the day after my boss left for China, not to be heard from for a month. Also his boss went into labor way earlier a few days after that, leaving me to report directly to the CTO for the better part of a month. I say they owe me!!!

So now we have this new platform and I ported everything over and did tons of version and module upgrades and tested it, only to have Internet Explorer fail. I am hoping it is because the times on the machines differ. Requests go through a load balancer, an apache 2.x proxy then to a back end apache 1.3/mod_perl/Mason back end.

On the home front, the pool needs a new liner, which should be delivered any day. My daughter toiok second in sectionals last weekend and my son's baseball team is tied for first. His basketball team took first this past season. Amazing for a kid who has a lot of my genes.

I guess the biggest news is on the weight front. I am down 42 lbs since the beginning of the year and going to the gym 3x per week. It feels good to be getting back in shape. It has been well over a decade since I was in any kind of shape, except round. My bicycle has been fixed up and I am riding that once a week as well. That will likely increase as we get into summer, but I really can't wait for the pool to be fixed so I may swim before work.

So I sit here, waiting for the networking group to sync my server and hoping for a release of the new iPhone shortly. Nothing more to report. We are going to a benefit concert this weekend as a guest of The Smithereens and have a BBQ on Sunday. I'm hoping to get to do the Ringo thing again this summer. :-D