I’ve watched all this behavior and remember this story about this little bird that fell out of a nest that was covered by some sympathetic creature in a pile of cow shit. Other predators would never get through the excrement and so the bird grew bigger. I remember hearing the moral of this story about being shit on, etc. This, in turn, makes me wonder about work at its more transparent of levels. We all seem sentenced to live inside that excrement at various time. Sometimes the sun comes out and warms things up and it stinks. Other times, its really cold and you cannot really smell it. But the facts is the facts. You are still covered with shit.

Its my last day off from work. I don’t feel shit on. Perhaps though I am just cold…

Yeah baby! That’s what happens. Welcome to the real world of windows computing. Go visit 2 data centers in 2 different geo’s to reboot or perhaps use a power rebooter to reach out to all those poor, stranded Windows servers.

Better yet, by far. Unplug the Cat5 cable and have perfect Windows security. Windows sucks. It always has sucked in data centers and it always will.

When I had 400 servers in two data centers, you know how many windows servers we had? We had one. You know how many debian linux servers we had? We had 399. That one windows server demanded more time than any 10 or 100 linux servers. The most resilient was our FreeBSD firewall box though. That OS is one stud workhorse. Windows is like a severely pimped out i386 of a nothing hardware platform.

Oh by the way; this is a subterfuge post. Don’t like it? Tough. I own this real estate.

In front of the place, there is this set of regulars that arrive each morning. These are the guys that all meet, perhaps retired, and also watch people. I heard one of them say when he watched this young asian woman walk in with a short skirt, “Damn Ed, she has legs all the way up to her a**”. They all laughed. Then this group of young yuppie looking business tycoons walked in. They all watched the young guys walk in with their office buds. Nothing was said. They all just laughed. Secret joke time.

So today I sat at a table next to them. One of the regulars looked at me and nodded. I guess I was welcomed to the clan. I felt included. Suddenly I was talking to this guy named “Earl”. He told me a bit of his story. Employed at Nummi and then not employed. Twenty-some years building fine cars. Then not. I casually enquired what was next for him. He told me that nothing was next. He was living in the moment.

Living in the moment. Seeing things as they are. Such is truth.

Been there; done that.

Work – why is this so necessary? And why do we toil away in obscurity and then when we approach some climactic meeting of stars, moon, sun it all breaks? I think work is a 4-lettered word and it brings together people that perhaps should not be included. We waste a lot of years on work. Then there is work that is meaningless. I’m sure you all have dealt with this. You do thing A. Thing A becomes a subset of Thing B. Thing B is controlled by C. Suddenly you find out that no one really wanted any of the things but you’re left with the baggage of doing them. Final question. Why is work so demeaning and yet by its nature the folks that demean you make the most demands? I’ve puzzled this out after 20 some years in technology. I think technology is a flawed endeavor and we do it for the worst of reasons and we see the worst side of people. We should all be in the 3rd grade on a playground where we have to share the toys. Perhaps we’d learn.

Play – Play ain’t what it used to be. I used to get enthralled and excited with play. It caught me, tuned me, made me see other worlds. Play now is escape only. But if I remember rightly it always used to be. But before it was for the best of reasons. We escaped to play another day. Now I just escape into some Linux or Windows world for the few hours I am not on a phone, in a meeting, or dealing with the first thing above.

Relationships – Hmm. We are not really good at this either folks. We simply do not know how to treat another person and we can never really have a “significant other”. Sorry to disappoint all the folks looking for life mates. Ain’t gonna work. You will never find the person of your dreams. Because they are “your dreams”. Too fucking bad for you. It will take you years to figure it out. Take it from me, having a relationship with someone else is not all its cracked up to be. You can never truly understand the other person. Opposites do not attract. There is not a soul-mate waiting patiently for your arrival. You are alone in the world, the stars, the universes. You are made of clay and the water level is rising.

Of course, all this may not be true. We may all be social creatures built with love and goodness. We may travel in other’s orbits and relish that interaction. If that’s the world I find myself in; I want the circular door going out.

I like running Ubuntu’s 64bit version and I don’t care about Windows enough to care what I run and where. Windows is just goofy with its anti-user friendly graphical dialogues like “are you sure; apply; done”. Why would I step through 9 steps of some stupid wizard if I did not want to apply it. Take off the apply button moronic misfits. Make it done so you can be done. How do people access a Windows system if the GUI or explorer or whatever is karflut? I cannot find a way to do this remotely. Is there one? If I have a graphical Linux system that craps remotely; most of the time I can reach it via the command-line and do meaningful things. Console tools for email, connectivity, backing up, restoring, networking are all there. Of course you have to know the so-called “non-intuitive commands”. Commands like “df”. What is df? Disk Free? Others commands like “mount”. What the hell? Oh, that shows what’s mounted. Or perhaps command like “uptime” What? But the king of all commands is “vi”.

Its not that I hate Windows. Lets just be clear. It has its placed suctioned off in VMware or VirtualBox where it can  be made to  behave. It just does not deserve a real processor, memory, or disk. In this virtual world, I can take snapshots and protect it. I’ve moved everyone here to Ubuntu. Son, wife, daughter. I’m done with desktop support on Windows with its attendant malware, spyware, anti-virus BS.

So perhaps I am just lazy and inclined to more. But Linux is simple and Windows is stupid. There I said it…

The truth is that none of these things are done on a computer using Windows 7 as a real operating system. Its all virtual folks. Its all part of this huge VDI file that VirtualBox manages. It parses that file when I boot Windows 7. It gives me the best parts of Windows (yes, there are good parts). I joked today that I saw a youtube video once about a Windows GUI tool that was a wizard that had 97 next pages. At the end, no matter what you answered it said, FAILED. Ain’t this just like Windows though? You all know that its broken and it has been broken and it always will be broken. The paradigm is that a modern graphical user interface is required to do things and you have to click NEXT and then either DONE or APPLY. What is the f’in difference with DONE and APPLY? I mean I don’t get why I would go through all that and still have a choice. I mean, doesn’t DONE do the same thing as APPLY?

So what works better you may ask? Well Ubuntu works better. Its the real host underlying all my fun on Windows 7. It takes its licking and keeps on ticking. It installs updates, deals with different networks, takes my USB devices. But, as others have noted, its not for the faint of heart. Its difficult. Why do people believe that I wonder? Well, its not made for Joe Average desktop user. You have to be technically savvy to use it.

So what’s the point? There is no point. Windows sucks and Ubuntu does not. Linux sucks and Windows does not. Its like the tools thing I have said before. We use tools that build what we need out. We are the habilis users of the universe. Tally up what you need and make a choice. I can live with Windows virtually because it ain’t good enough to be real. And I’m lazy. Too damned lazy to want malware and antivirus and alerts and registry keys and control panels.

Take it from there folks and build your reality.

In all this, I’ve reached the conclusion perhaps much like a hero of mine Edward Abbey that there is no ultimate goodness, no ultimate reality, there is really nothing. Nothing is everything and its a panacea, a paradigm, a truth that haunts us. Asteroids hurtling through space, the look on your face, welcome to the human race. Sorry James Taylor but you said it so eloquently before,

The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time
Any fool can do it
There ain’t nothing to it
Nobody knows how we got to
The top of the hill
But since we’re on our way down
We might as well enjoy the ride

The secret of love is in opening up your heart
It’s okay to feel afraid
But don’t let that stand in your way
’cause anyone knows that love is the only road
And since we’re only here for a while
Might as well show some style
Give us a smile

Isn’t it a lovely ride
Sliding down
Gliding down
Try not to try too hard
It’s just a lovely ride

Now the thing about time is that time
Isn’t really real
It’s just your point of view
How does it feel for you
Einstein said he could never understand it all
Planets spinning through space
The smile upon your face
Welcome to the human race

Some kind of lovely ride
I’ll be sliding down
I’ll be gliding down
Try not to try too hard
It’s just a lovely ride

Isn’t it a lovely ride
Sliding down
Gliding down
Try not to try too hard
It’s just a lovely ride

So, just enjoy the ride and repeat after me, “its not really real”. I’m pretty convinced that Edward Abbey and James Taylor got it right. So, what’s the point of this blather you ask? Well, there is none really folks. Its just me, feeling a bit tired and irritated at things, writing a blogpost in a Starbucks at about 6pm.

1. It includes the entire iPhone OS so you can run iPhone Applications on your OSX box. Except for sexy bathing suit and wifi finder apps.
2. It includes the entire appstore including every last “fart measurement” application known to man.
3. Finally, you can mount USB drives that are not formatted with FAT32 file systems! Yay!
4. Its based on a Windows kernel now so you get the Windows 7 look with the venerable Finder. With Windows 7 you get the finest in Windows updates bundled along with your OSX updates.

Seriously is this whole thing some kind of joke or something? Maybe it has a iPad feminine hygiene device in Boot Camp too? Given the choice however unlikely of running either OSX or Windows 7 on real hardware, I can still install Windows 7 on VMware or Virtualbox and OSX still requires super-human effort to virtualize. Why is that?  For an OS of choice, there is relatively little choice you have that stays legal. You can HACKintosh it, jailbreak it. But it still looks the same. Messy GOO, messy iPhone interface, iPad that looks like a 10.1 inch or whatever touch.

Friends don’t let friends run OSX. Just virtualize Windows 7 on commodity Ubuntu hardware. Windows 7 is not safe for real hardware either folks. Just a warning from the little brown daemon.

Friends tell me how hard Linux is to install and use and I’m always amazed by that. The majority of configurations and values and options are set in clear text files and often either poorly or well commented. My experience with Debian and Ubuntu is that things have gotten better. Of course if you want to use a Wizard for everything, Windows Seven dot Oh beckons. Then there is the update thing. I think Linux solved the whole update thing a decade ago at least. Now when you add new packages, you just add a new software source and that source is tracked automatically. Windows update is one cantankerous critter with Windows, Non Windows, third party updates, Kb updates, other updates. I’m sure that this all makes Windows Seven dot Oh easier to use though

So, dear readers, Windows 7 dot Oh is plenty kewl and it runs like gangbusters. Applications just open fast and trouble free. But don’t give it real hardware. Those new versions of that old legacy software will just plain go crazy. Friends don’t let friends install Windows on real hardware. You are asking for nothing but trouble…

Then the 3d generation touch… I had it for 2 days or so. I reset it numerous times. 100k applications but all through one place. Buh bye. Now I am down to my ARchos 5 android device and the rockbox’ed video. The Archos is decent. It plays all my mp3s, stores my photos, and has enough room left over to have movies on it. How do you add music to it? Easiest way on Ubuntu is to rsync music to it or just copy and paste or whatever. Its a simple usb disk drive when you need it to be. That’s not to say that my Archos is perfect. It has its Android moments. Sometimes it gets confused when I tap too quickly. I am learning to be patient with it. I like having everything on one thing though and it runs Linux.

So what do I prefer? The database thing or the simple USB disk drive thing? Seems to me the easiest way to add stuff is when its a USB drive. Linux does things real well in that mode. Plug it in, it mounts. Copy stuff to it or from it. Music comes off clean. No strange db-cursed titles. I still wonder why Apple in their supposed media superiority did things that way. I guess to again lock us mere mortals down to using only their devices with our music that we rent from iTunes. I won’t get started with iTunes though because it took me almost 6 months to get away from it, de-DRM my music, and shift my music purchasing to amazonmp3.com.

I always wonder why MAC users prefer the arguably insane iTunes interface to their world; yet they all complain about Microsoft Outlook or entourage. You’d figure they’d grok Outlook completely after using iTunes for so long. Honestly, the two are not that dis-similar. For me, I don’t use some dedicated application to manage my music besides rsync, a command line, and a simple script.

As I said going into this; I am not a fanbois. No iPad for me in April. No MAC laptop. No i-anything if I can help it. I’ll stick with 3 to 5 year old thinkpad T60 laptops that cost $500.00 US which will take Windows 7 or Ubuntu Karmic in minutes. I’ll also just go ahead and keep my decidedly inferior Android devices which are just USB Drives.