October 31, 2008
Thanks to our two small daughters, this time of year becomes a non-stop parade of crowns, magic wands, and taffeta and satin gowns.
Apple of My Eye is always very concerned that I don’t ever have a costume picked out for Halloween. After all, it’s something she spends months carefully deciding. Big stuff when you’re a kid, since it’s a whole ‘nother YEAR before you can dress up again.
So when it came time to carve a pumpkin this year, both Apple of My Eye and Cute as a Button had definite ideas about what they wanted.
AoME doesn’t like scary stuff at all. To the point that she doesn’t even like to think that villains are anything worse than naughty scamps. CaaB is more fearless, but even she prefers fun scary to the scary scary. Altho, it is important to note that CaaB is afraid of neither Cybermen nor Daleks, but is scared of ghosts.
So the choice was obvious…Sleeping Beauty.
Running Antelope took care of the heavy lifting. Namely, the thankless job of scooping out the pumpkin guts and scraping the inside wall of the pumpkin. Yes, she rocks.
Then I got busy with a template and some carving tools. An hour or so later, I had this…
Which is already pretty cool. But NOTHING beats what it looks like with the lights out…
Already looking forward to next year. I’m laying odds it will be Tinkerbell.
|| posted by chris under nostalgia, time || comments (1) ||
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July 6, 2008
There’s no single more important thing to the long-term health of any network system than accurate time.
Without accurate time, there is no way to assure than any transactions flying in that environment will maintain fidelity. In other words…
There’s no way to know that databases, Active Directory, file systems, or anything else that uses any kind of timestamp isn’t shredding itself to bits.
10 years ago or so, time sync used to be much more of an issue. Oh sure, you could always load a dialer program that would call Colorado (in the US) and get a time adjust to the master clocks. But that was a major pain in the tookus. And it cost you money with each call.
Thanks to the glorious achievement that is the Internet, and a little gem called Network Time Protocol AKA NTP (including its eponymous sibling Simple Network Time Protocol AKA SNTP), time sychronization became largely a moot issue in data networks during the 90s.
The key to time synchronization, at least as far as maintaining a healthy network goes, is not so much having correct time (more on that in a minute), but having consistent time, which are two very different concepts.
Although it might make your users mad when the clocks on their PCs are off a bit, it is usually far more healthy for the average data network to be 5 minutes off everywhere, as opposed to having different parts of the network running on-time whle other parts do not.
The consistency of time in a data network has far-ranging implications. For Active Directory, one of the primary functions that depends on consistent time is network logon.
That’s because Active Directory uses Kerberos tickets to validate logon traffic. The tickets, which are by design time sensitive and expire so that captured traffic cannot be replayed and used to compromise systems in a classic man-in-the-middle attack, rely on consistent time. We’re normally talking about a 5 minute (which is an absolute eternity, in computer time actually) for everything to remain both hunky and dory.
The stampede rush to all things virtualization is poised to make time synchronization a key network design issue, all over again.
Because when the magic act that is virtualization makes the hardware go poof, there’s one major thing that goes away forever…
The BIOS Clock
Sure, a BIOS clock isn’t the end all, be all.
But it will keep you, and your systems, in the ballpark.
So if you aren’t spending time planning clock synchronization for your virtual systems, you’d best get that taken care of, and pronto.
|| posted by chris under business, hardware, it pro, migration, rx, time, virtualization || comments (2) ||
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July 4, 2008
There have been plenty of great female action stars on the big screen over the years…
Marion Ravenwood
Lara Croft
Every character played by Michelle Yeoh
and even…
Dora The Explorer
Pixar just gave us another one…
A long long time ago, in a lifetime far far away (20 years to be exact)…
I was in a session at a writer’s conference where a very well-known author basically told me I was full of it because…
Cartoons cannot, and will not, ever be able to adequately express emotion.
So all I can say now is…
Suck it OSC!
Best of all…
Emotion-expressing animation or not…
I got to see Wall-E with Cute as a Button right beside me.
And that’s always a good time!
|| posted by chris under epiphany, hardware, media, robot, rx, thumbs up, time || comments (0) ||
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October 18, 2007
or…
All Your Base Are Belong To SIMSOC
Sweet mother of Moses!
As fantastic as Leadership Tuscaloosa has been already, our second session was, quite frankly…
Nothing short of amazing, bordering on spectacular.
This week, for 3 hours on Tuesday night and 8 hours yesterday, we participated in a session of SIMSOC AKA Simulated Society, a free-form live-action sociology game which was first created 41 years ago by Dr. William A. Gamson. And it is definitely the pioneering work to which every RPG (think D&D) and every LARP in the world should pay homage.
Honestly, if you’ve never participated in a SIMSOC…you should.
There are public SIMSOCs available from time to time. I know there was one held in San Diego earlier this year.
I feel very fortunate to have been a participant, mainly because of how eerily accurate it all was. How certain situations arose, almost of their own accord, that were spooky-real.
Most of all, I think it taught me a lot about myself, and how certain things I think, say and do…could stand a good bit of working on.
If you are a former SIMSOC participant, it’d be great if you posted a shoutout here at the Funcave.
I think of SIMSOC like a live-action “Choose Your Own Adventure” movie, in which you are a cast member. Because that’s kind of what it is.
But talking about SIMSOC with someone who’s never participated…would be worse than telling them most awful kind of spoiler about a movie they have been dying to see.
So…any comments posted might be edited to keep the asskickingness of SIMSOC a secret for those who haven’t yet been through one.
If there are enough former SIMSOC participants who respond…I might just be convinced to set up a private SIMSOC discussion lounge over at the Funboard.
And, in case you missed it, here’s the classic web meme AYBABTU, one simple click away…
SIMSOC will get inside your head, just like that classic mashup.
Enjoy the mental flossing!
|| posted by chris under business, community, epiphany, game, media, nostalgia, opinion, rant, rx, shoutout, time, virtualization || comments (0) ||
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September 5, 2007
And no, I don’t mean Were you holding?
Jason Langridge AKA Mr. Mobility mentions peeving off a customer recently who wanted a 10 year roadmap regardiing Mobility.
Think about where mobile devices themselves were at, all the way back in 1997…
wavy lines denoting start of dream sequence
Palm…ruled the roost. No argument about that cold, hard fact.
Windows CE 2…was the release WinCE 1 should have been.
Blackberry…was still 2 years from addicting & then destroying the thumbs of lawyers, judges, marketing execs, and everyone in-between.
Apple…was still reeling from the stunning market failure of the Newton 4 years earlier. It was also 2 years into getting its ass handed to it by Microsoft and their supa-killah, Windows 95. In other news…Jobs came back, and the phoenix-like rise from their own ashes commenced a few months later.
wavy lines denoting end of dream sequence
My how times have changed, haven’t they?
This is exactly the kinda stuff we’re going to talk about at the next IPSA meeting, which I had to give the funktastic title…
Mobile 2.0 and The Amazing Technicolor Dream You
So be there, or be square…
|| posted by chris under hardware, mobility, nostalgia, time, travel, unified comm || comments (0) ||
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