As I’ve mentioned, I’m bummed, burned, and charred. I need time away from things. Its been a rough month at a few levels. If you expect email from me at any ole place, expect delays. The vacation responder is on and I don’t intend on answering.

I also am going to assess my place in the cosmic force the next 4 days. I don’t expect full enlightenment; but I do expect to clear out the bad feelings. If this does not happen, then I’ll have to take some other more permanent action. I cannot persist being this unhappy with work.

Wearin’ my high boots,
Got all my worldlies here in a sack
Looking for something,
Knowing that it ain’t here where I’m at
Ain’t looking back
I’m comin’,
Ride by thumbin’,
Get by bummin’
I’m on my way

I see those places when I sit here at home now. This place is where I am but its not where its at. It seems every other place I go has something to offer until I get home. Its not work, play, life, relationships. Its what’s left that I find. Simply not enough to keep me here. Sadness, joy, children. Perhaps at some point not enough. The road is the place that I find the most joy. Simply the traveling and not the arrival.

What is it about the physical act of the movement? Perhaps its the not being here or there that matters. The universe, cultures, lives, civilizations all spin. I spin in my orbit. Am I no less than the nebulae, the stars that shine when I fly under?

Its going to be time to hit that glory road again. I can feel it.

1. I visited Chennai about every 4 months for 2 weeks to work with the Celestix India team on a variety of QA, development, research, and HR and business needs.
2. Last year I spent almost 6 months in Chennai. I enjoyed every minute of it and learned that Mylapore is a fantastic place to hunker down and live.
3. I came over this time to close the Celestix India office for Celestix Networks. All told, I terminated about 20 people. Of those 4 are moving to Singapore and 4 are staying in Chennai working as Celestix Singapore employees. The rest are gone or soon gone. There is no joy in my heart or soul for this work. I did what the company asked me to do. It was not one of those things where someone says, “good job, Mike. Thanks for going”.
4. I missed a trip I had planned to Boston and then back on the AMTRAK from Boston to Emeryville, CA. When faced with the alternative of someone else doing what needed to be done; there really was no choice. It had to be me.
5. I am not sure what I am going to do next. I have this feeling I need to start moving on. Perhaps I’ve done all I can do where I am at now. I’m just not so sure anymore what I deliver. I’m going to think about it on vacation.

A blog is a decent place to state some facts. I feel better now. Most of all, I want to say thanks to the team at Celestix Networks I manage. Engineering has the potential to be a great group but it needs something. Some added touch. It needs a rallying point that is not a founder, a entrepreneur, an exception. It needs to be healthy. Question is: Can I do that? Do I want to do that?

I think I do. But there will have to be changes made before I do. I won’t presume to announce those here. Its cathartic enough to just state these things on my territory. Thanks to everyone in India, the US, Singapore for always being there. I like the engineering group and its potential. We just need to get away from the exceptions that team around us and make us less.

I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to build things at Celestix Networks like the QA Engineering group. We’ve taken how we do quality engineering to new levels; but it requires some redoing as well. its too bad that one event can destroy a year of building and that I am the person that brought the event here.

Take care all. I won’t be writing here for awhile.

Its this crazy touch of person, stone, tools which results in this wondrous work. I always was amazed at the flintknapper, the focus to detail, the final result. Here’s a pictorial review of the worker at work. I could only make “footballs” and John Fagan would tell me “good work, Michael. Footballs are useful tools”. Then John would show me the craft. In his hands this piece of stone became a artwork; reduced into a thing of beauty and quite lethal.

Why am I saying all this though? What does all this archeological stuff have to do with information technology or the price of masala dosa’s in Chennai? Well, nothing really. But really everything is connected. The stone in the knapper’s hands, the work we do in project management, the changes we all feel are necessary when push comes to shove. Its flintknapping at the most basic of levels. We need to remove the chaff from the wheat, resharpen our tools, get back to something which matters. For Mr. Fagan, it was all these different stone types, tools, replicating what he saw on archeological sites. Replication is another key. Whether you do QA or archeological reconstruction, or anthropological research, you use replication. You need to find another thing which acts the same, can be tested, studied, redone.

I did this once with prehistoric hearths or cooking features. I wondered what made them grow larger over time. I thought it was some simplistic explanation. Maybe it was. But then I watched people gathering around a campfire. When more people are added, the space between each person was impacted. It dawned on me that perhaps we could use hearths as a possible interpretation for prehistoric cultural growth in the western Mojave Desert. In QA engineering, you also start with a known. You apply scientific rigor to locate “edge cases” which may cause an inflection in the pattern. These edge cases can be used to then locate issues. But its all about replication and interpretation. The QA engineer’s mind seems wound differently than ours. Just like the flintknapper’s may. They look at different patterns but its the same final result.

Life is like this too. We look for patterns but there are always inflections or subtle differences. I’m looking at the patterns and differences in my own life now. Which ones do I need. Which ones can I toss.

Now Kudos are fun to get but they are also fun to give. They are a mark, a moment, a reward. For many of the people I work with on a daily basis in Singapore and those that I will leave behind from Celestix India, here’s a kudo. I respect, admire, and am touched by you all. Thanks to you guys. I’ll miss you. Chennai has become a special place but more than that you are all special people. Kudos to you.

There is a group in other places which are not so deserving of Kudos. I’m pretty sure that all those same places, regardless of religious affiliation understand the concept of Hell. I won’t mention names because those that don’t get Kudos will get other rewards as you journey through the moments of your life. Just as I am sure of the Kudos I give I am sure also that you less rewarding types will get the rewards you so deserve. Its hot down there guys. Don’t be afraid though, you will have plenty of company. People that lie, cheat, mis-represent never get Kudos except from the Devil. And we know what those are like.
Ouch, Burned Fingers, Ouch.

We never know from whence Kudos will come next. The future is shrouded in mystery but I have parted the veils. I can see that things will change and evolve. Because nothing ever stays the same.

Now, it appears that lnxpowered.org DNS changes have propagated through the wild internet and my site resolves. My blog has endured! I have to admit to taking a backup of the blog and the database just in case.

It all survived though and I’m happy with the up and down speed. I’m getting about 20 mb/s down now and almost 4 mb/s up. Very significant compared to what I had before. I also managed to get the venerable and rather ancient WRT54G with the Tomato firmware on it working. Only real downtime was having to read how to get my firewall and DHCP server working with the comcast modem.

All done though! I’m happy.

I’ve started a few posts here about some things but decided to not finalize or post them. One big note is I am changing internet service providers next Tuesday. This blog will be down for quite some time I believe. I will need to re-think how I do the hosting part of things since I am moving to Comcast Cable internet and will need to do dynamic DNS for my domain. I’ll probably get that accomplished after a few weeks. I may get ambitious and do it quicker so I can post my thoughts to the blog as I train across the US.

On the toy front, I purchased a pandigital novel just for fun and hacked it to become a basic android tablet. Now it can read Barnes and Noble, Aldiko, and Kindle books. After seeing it, I prefer the Kindle experience. Its just a nicer reading experience. I don’t think I could do the iPad reading experience either so I will stick with the superlative kindle and wait for the 3rd generation kindle to come which is lighter, has more memory and will last a much longer time on battery with no wifi active.

That’s really about it now. Time for yet another work call. My life is judged by how many times in a week I can do evening calls I guess.

Then the T60 came along. This laptop is a workhorse. It handles either Windows or Ubuntu gracefully and I’ve dropped them on the floor, had them fall out of carriers when traveling, and done other mischief and they just continue to tick. Way back when at Linuxcare we developed a custom Linux distribution for the IBM Thinkpad group on the T23′s. Those were very nice for their time too.

If you want a laptop that’s still a laptop and that has that fabled thinkpad staying power; I suggest something along the lines of the T60 to T61p for computing that will keep on going. You can find them on overstock. Get one with a gig of memory and a 60g SATA drive for about $390.00. Now go shopping at a memory store and get the memory upgrade and a 500g SATA drive. Plug both in. The memory will require remove the handpad reset thing in front of the keyboard. Its easy though. The disk drive has these dinky screws in the hard drive caddy on the right front of the laptop. Watch out there. If there is one funky thing, its how they have the disk drives mounted. But get done and you have a laptop for the ages. It will work for you for years and its cheap. Put Ubuntu Lucid on it and enjoy computing with no licensing restrictions. If you need Windows, why not just do it virtually? I do both at work. I have a native Windows 7 T60 and then my daily ubuntu escape laptop. Things are cheap enough now to have two of them.

Consider this a unsolicited positive statement for the quality that IBM and then Lenovo packed into the T line of laptops. Serious computing power dudes.

This year, my son and I were at home together. We BBQ’ed a turkey breast, tri-tip beef roast, broccoli with Newman’s lite Italian dressing and some hotlink beef sausages. Very good. I don’t want to overstate this but I am good at the BBQ thing when it comes to things like entire turkey breasts or whole turkeys or chickens. A whole turkey on the Weber is something no one should ever miss. It makes an oven cooked turkey into a dried out boot.

So we ate today and talked a bit. I made Ore-ida Crispy french fries because my son loves them and they’re easy. We ate too well and we laughed a bit. Too soon it was over and he repositioned himself to his room. My daughter would stay with me, help in the kitchen, laugh at my stupid jokes. I miss some of that. In honesty, I miss less and less of my wife as the whole thing goes on. She is just not instrumental in my polarity .  I’ll always love you Val. Liking you is kinda hard sometimes.

Happy 4th family unit and to the other 3 or 4 people that read this thing.

But all that has gotten to be less of an issue now with the release of the Kindle reader on Android. Now things like travel or tour books like Lonely Planet can be reviewed on my NexusOne or my Archos Android tablet. Its so easy and effortless now to travel and do the walking tours I love to do. Tokyo especially is my city of walking. I love seeing the places in that huge city of cities. Before though I lugged around the kindle and worried about it. Now I can download the tour guide I want and carry just my Archos tablet and have music, photos, books. Wow!

Reading has just become even easier. The android app also lets you buy books right from the phone or tablet. Very nice work.

We’ve all heard of convergence devices where a number of uses come together. Applications like Kindle for Android extend and enhance our use of the written word and make it extensible and worthy of use.

Thanks google for android and i mean it! You have upped the ante of my enjoyment of the entire phone thing to a level of hackery, kernel downloading, ROM installations, themes. Its all cool. Then when you add some good applications which may seem simple but that do the rest. Wow! You have this platform that is converging.

This makes tablet computers that much more useful be they iPad or my preferred green robot OS.