Monthly Archives: March 2010

Spring = Daffodils…

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Each year in the spring, the daffodils put on a show at my parent’s house in Pitt County. My great-aunt Lottie (born 1895) planted the first ones at the homeplace in the 1930’s. This year, WRAL’s Tarheel Traveler visited during the peak bloom and interviewed my mom and dad. They didn’t give their names nor the exact location, as they get plenty of traffic there anyway. It’s a neat piece. We’ve got many pictures of our own kids in the flowers…hope you enjoy the video!

Shad fishing, 2010

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On March 19th, Sam and I made our annual pilgrimage to Weldon to hook up with some Hickory Shad. I’d like to do more than one trip, but I’m happy just to be able to go! We knew that it might be a bit early in the season, with the high water recently and cool temperatures. However, with a day scheduled off work, and the forecast for a beautiful day, we headed to the river. When we got there about 9:45AM, the river was running ~9000cfs, and very stained. We launched the boat and were quickly on the river. We ran downstream past the water treatment plant and were thinking about going to Troublefield Gut (~2.8 miles downstream on river left, per the NC Wildlife map), but a boat was already there. We ran downstream further, stopping and trying a few places. Not even a bump. River temperatire was 47F per my boat’s sensor. Went all the way down to Halifax (about 10 miles) to see if the water was any warmer or if any fish were there. Nada. Tried the long rods and spinners, no luck. Turned around, and went back upstream. About 12:45PM, we got back to Troublefield Gut and no one was there, so we anchored. I had a couple of bumps and soon caught a white perch. Then, Sam caught a small striper. We were both fishing full sink lines at the time, and were down on the bottom. We then started picking up shad. Not a banner day, but 15-20 fish between the two of us from 1PM to 3:30PM. We switched to sink tips from the full sink lines as the fishfinder seemed to indicate that there were fish 5-6 feet down. Seemed to work, as we both caught more on the sink tips. Interestingly, the water temp warmed to 50F by the time we left, and that might have helped.

As we left, we saw about a half dozen boats near the water treatment plant. Talked to one group, and they said that they’d caught some, but like us it was sporadic.

We caught all our fish on pink flies (though I’ll make ’em a bit differently sometimes), and didn’t catch anything on the spinners until we changed to pink jigs. So, for us, pink was the color of choice.

Headed for the ramp about 3:45PM, and then back home…

Pictures here…

Walled garden computing, the once and future model…

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I just left a meeting, and in the post-meeting discussions, I was talking with a colleague about computer security. I wanted to write this down, as I’m getting more passionate about limited functionality, walled garden devices.

I wear the hat (among many others) of managing the UNCG information security office, and I’ve seen the challenges we’ve had coping with the deluge of new threats and system problems of the last couple of months. It’s not just here, but a part of a larger phenomenon. I am much less sanguine, day by day, that we can protect the “organizational” (corporate, university, etc.) general purpose computing device at scale. Sure, you can do a decent job protecting some, but it’s very labor intensive and takes a lot of user education. I talked with my colleague about thin-client solutions being our likely future, and I think that this is true. Now, on to some more radical thinking. I believe we’re seeing the beginning of the end of the general purpose device as the standard end-user tool. As I walked back to my office, I was reflecting on my recent iPad order, and I believe that such devices (the iPad won’t be perfect, but it’s a great example of the class of device I’m describing) are what we’ll be using. Reasonably extensible via easy-to-install applications, and applications vetted by a central entity. Reasonably flexible in what you can do, but very hard to shoot yourself in the metaphorical foot. I believe in net neutrality, and I believe in the need for general purpose devices, but not for everyone. They are complicated, a lot of work to maintain and patch, and far too easy to compromise.

The future is with thin client/tightly managed desktops in business, where it harkens back to my old mainframe terminal days, and for personal computing, cloud-based services accessed via a walled garden appliance. Think about it. It’s coming…