Author Archives: joel

About joel

Retired Higher Ed administrator, flyfisherman and geek

Catching up on technology

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Dinner over, a bit of rain so we won’t go for a walk around the neighborhood here at Emerald Isle, so I’m helping my sister with a bit of tech. First, we set up a twitter account for her, and tried to connect it to Facebook. However, the Facebook Twitter app seems to be a bit confused ;-). Better try in a couple days after they fix it, as it doesn’t allow you to input your Twitter credentials.

Getting ready to set up a blog for her. Waiting for the subdomain setting to apply thru the DNS system so I can attach the blog (1and1.com uses WordPress).

Hope we see a bit of sun (or at least no rain) tomorrow; would like to take the boat to Bear Island. Getting in a summer frame of mind. Must be 5 o’clock somewhere 😉

Graduation weekend

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One down, one to go 😉

This past weekend was busy! Jeff’s birthday, Jason’s graduation from Virginia Tech, and the 28th anniversary for Jan and I. We took Friday off work, and headed to Blacksburg. We were glad we had a place to stay. It’s tough to get a hotel room in Blacksburg or anywhere within 50 miles for graduation weekend; reservations have to be made a year in advance. VT is a big university (4,000 undergrads, and about 1,000 grad students) and not a big town. With all the family who want to see, it’s a challenge to get a spot. We lucked out and through a tip from my friends on the flyfishing listserve, got on the waiting list and then got rooms at the Inn at Riverbend, a B&B about 20 miles west of town in Pearisburg, VA. What a nice place. It’s every bit as nice as it looks on their website. The innkeepers (Lynn & Linda, with help from the manager Eric) are very hospitable, the food was great, and the Inn dogs are friendly! I highly recommend it if you are looking for a place to stay in that area. Here’s a picture I took (with my blackberry, so sorry for the quality) from the deck on the first afternoon when we arrived.

First event was the Computer Science departmental graduation at 4PM on Friday, followed by the University ceremony in Lane Stadium at 7:30PM. Saturday morning was the College of Engineering graduation, where they read all 1,000 names while the graduates traipsed across the stage.

A few hours of relaxation on Saturday afternoon; I went to Little Stony in nearby Pembroke and harassed a few trout. A very nice dinner at The Bank Food and Drink in Pearisburg. Just beat the approaching cold front, and watched the rain sheet off the windows while we ate. Fortunately, it stopped before time to head back to the Inn. Jeff didn’t get much of a birthday party, but all got cards, etc. at dinner. Jan and I then enjoyed some Duval Leroy bubbly and the hot tub back at the room 😉

Sunday was moveout…packed up his apartment, loaded the Uhaul and headed back to Chapel Hill. Whew! I sure could have used a weekend to rest up from the weekend. Jason’s off now in DC for an internship before starting grad school. We’ll all get back in the grind here at home…

Wonderful April beach weekend…

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What a fantastic April weekend! Temperatures in the 90’s in the piedmont meant 70’s at the coast. I took a couple of hours of vacation and left town early enough to beat the traffice through Raleigh. We arrived at Emerald Isle about 6:30PM in time to get oysters at Jordan’s for dinner Friday. Spent the day Saturday at Bear Island. Put the boat in at Island Harbor and ran down the ICW to the Bear Inlet cut. It’s shoaled up a lot since last October, but we still got in and out (the tide was very low when we left in early afternoon). The Carolina Skiff doesn’t draw much water. Water temps in the upper 60’s, southwest breeze about 10-15 knots, air temp in the mid 70’s. Doesn’t get much better than this! Lessa sure liked it. Heading back again Sunday morning. Gee, can I call in sick Monday?

Belated fishing posting, March 27th…

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A long weekend means a bit of time for discretionary computer activities…this is a report from a trip I took to the Roanoke River on March 27th to fish for Hickory Shad…

In spite of the promise (guarantee!?) of rain and the high water levels, my fishing buddy Sam and I headed to Weldon, NC to try our luck, as I had this day off from work with no promise of another day anytime soon. We arrived in Weldon at 10AM, and launched the boat. So nice to start these 4-cycle engines, just turn the key, and it starts just like a car.

The big rapids right across from the ramp were completely washed out, with the flow ~15,000cfs. Headed downstream to see if we could find a spot. At high water like this, your best bet will be tight up next to the banks, or especially where one of the small creeks comes into the river, creating slack water. Spotted a number of boats at the water treatment plant downstream of the ramp. We grabbed a spot, but weren’t in a good position, and decided to head downstream a bit further…went a ways, not quite to Big Rock; didn’t see any place we liked but tried a couple. Tough even to anchor at this flow level. The river is about 20 feet deep bank to bank with the current really ripping through. Nothing doing with the fish, though the fish finder showed fish (if you believe those things 😉 ). We headed back upriver, and found that the folks who had been in the mouth of a little creek on the north side of the river had left. We anchored there and started catching fish. Not a huge number, but reasonably steady action. Sam and I each caught 15-20. Several were nice, heavy fish. The rain held off until about 2:30PM or so. We fished in the rain a while (gave the bilge pump a workout) and headed back to the ramp about 3:30PM to head back to Chapel Hill. A nice day!

Pictures here…

Book Review, “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand

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Nothing like reviewing a book 52 years after publication. Well, 1957 was a very good year, as I was born then 😉

This is a book that’s been on my reading list for a while. Somehow, I managed to avoid it in high school and college. I’ve been reading a fair number of economics books in the last couple years, trying to understand some of the things that are going on around us, and I felt I need to pick this one up. And “pick it up” is the right thing to say, as the paperback copy from Carrboro Branch Library was 1069 pages!

I won’t try to do an exhaustive review, as this has been done by folks with much more energy that I have! There are thousands of reviews on Amazon alone. I’ll just give a few of my overarching impressions. First, I’ll have to say that it’s a good read. There are parts that do get slow, but the characters are compelling and the story engaging. What did I get out of it? Let’s see…capitalism works to incent folks to work hard. Check, knew that. Government bad? It can be (and was for much of 2000-2008), but I believe in moderation. Let the innovators and industrialists who take risks reap the rewards. Check, even though I’m not one. Discourage rewards from innovation and industry and the economy goes to hell. Doh. Check! However, taxes are not inherently bad in my worldview (even though I’m filing mine at the last minute 😉 ), as sometimes people just won’t pay to maintain the “commons” or do things for common good (check this for a great explanation of the Tragedy of the Commons, explained with Smurfs). Provide a safety net, but encourage people to help themselves. The best use of taxes is education in my mind, but I digress…

I think that the most fascinating thing, though, is to have read this book over the past month (March-April 2009), given the context of things happening in the world economy, and reflecting on the different approaches world-wide to moving us out of this morass. It’s not quite the world of Dagney, Hank, Francisco & John Galt out there today, but it does make one think about the steps we are taking as we navigate through the “late unpleasantness.” I’m just glad our current president is a thinker who is willing to listen and learn.

If you haven’t read this, you should, if for no other reason than the fact that it has been so influential on many free-market thinkers. Gee, there’s that education thing again…

Memory in the computing clouds?

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Time for a technology posting! A dearth of meetings on my calendar today gave me a chance to catch up, and then to go and read some of my favorite RSS feeds and troll for some useful perspectives on where computing is heading. I’m more and more convinced that the SaaS (software as a service) industry is going to make it this time (unlike the first Internet boom of the late 1990’s). Physical infrastructure is more robust, connectivity is better, and application architectures are much more sophisticated and capable. One thing that caught my eye today was a cloud computing blog posting that referenced a great article on Cloud-Based Memory Architectures. I think that this is really where things have been headed for a while, we just didn’t realize it. Need performance? Big disk arrays with more cache. Hold indexes in memory. Are you I/O bound in your app? Odds are, yes…I’ve seen that time and time again, even when I thought from looking at the system performance tools that I was not I/O bound. Anyway, the article referenced above is a great set of thoughts and links on this subject. It’s a long read, but if you are interested in application architectures, it’s worth it.

How do I see this trend affecting computing at organizations like mine, UNCG? I think that we’ll see more applications moved to the cloud, not just for cost savings in hardware and support staff, but for performance. With big pipes we can consolidate in ways that leverage business/organizational scalability, and by moving to applications where the canonical copy of the data is in memory, not disk, we’ll gain substantial performance benefits. We need to be prepared to continue to move applications away from our own machine rooms. As this develops, though, it will be interested to see how issues surrounding security and backup will be handled…

Snow in the south…

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One nice thing about snow in North Carolina…things tend to shut down for a day or so when it snows. Yesterday, it poured rain all day, but changed over to snow about 10PM and dropped 3 or 4 inches of fluffy powder here in Chapel Hill. Got out for a walk with the dogs, the woods were quiet and still. I’m at home today enjoying a “snow day” as UNCG is closed for the day (more snow west of here in the Greensboro area) and we have a nice approach to adverse weather. If the University is closed, then faculty and staff and students stay home; staff don’t have to make up time. Think I’ll go grab a cup of tea!

Another nice winter beach weekend…

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Another weekend escape…yeah, the weather forecast was for rain and the weatherman delivered! However, we were able to get out for a walk when we got to Emerald Isle on Friday night, and while is was pouring rain first thing today (Saturday) the rain stopped for several hours and we got two good walks on the beach. Temperature was about 60 and virtually no wind, though the surf was rolling and the fog was thick. The dogs enjoy the beach in winter, as they can run and have a great time. Steamed oysters at Jordan’s on Friday and Saturday. The Tarheels clobbered Georgia Tech today; the cable guy put a temporary fix on the line (until they bury a new cable) so Pandora can happily stream tunes…a good day! Snow back at home Sunday? Have to watch the weather and maybe head back early…

Blackberry update…

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It’s been about 3 weeks since I got my Blackberry. Overall, I’m quite happy (see my earlier post), but there is one thing that really annoys me — the GPS! A little bit of googling and a trip to the forums at crackberry.com will convince you of the weirdness that’s out there. There are OS issues. There are application issues. There are carrier issues…gee, how hard can it be to make it work? The carriers seem intent on figuring out how to incrementally monetize use of GPS. Here is one place where the monoline strategy that Apple used with the iPhone & AT&T does make sense; it means that they can offer a more consistent user experience on functions like this.

I think that I’ve more or less figured out how to make my GPS work with the BlackBerry maps app — if the GPS lock is taking too long, pop the battery, but wait long enough to drain the capacitors before reinserting the battery. This hard reset seems to improve things dramatically, but you should not have to do that! Must be some really buggy code in there. There does not, from what I’ve seen, seem to be any consistency about which “point release” of the 4.5 OS that you are running and the impact on this. Oh well, the other apps work well, and it makes a great phone…

Our recursively-linked web2.0 world…

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I’m spending a bit of time trying to parse out how all the various common social networking services interconnect as I try to be a better “social webber” 😉 . Let’s see…Facebook gets updates from Friendfeed…I have Flickr connected to Facebook and Friendfeed? Hmmm…OK, Picasa is also connected to Friendfeed. Now, let’s bring in Youtube. I’ve got my Twitter updates going to Facebook (as well as my “home” page; IM status changes through Friendfeed. I have an RSS feed from this blog going to Friendfeed. Gee, looks like I’m updating myself. I have not been as good about publishing stuff as I could be. I try to make sure that the things I do and say follow the rules of decorum (I’ve had a personal website for over 15 years now, and believe I’ve figured out the right amount of information to “leak out” about myself) and have a reasonable degree of content, adding some measure of worth to the ether. I try to keep my social presence and professional presence reasonably separate. Not easy, tho!

While I’m “over the hill” in web years, I’ve tried to stay abreast of the technologies both from how various sites are rendered to at least a basic understanding of the plumbing underneath them (though I haven’t done serious coding in much too long). My message is that this stuff weaves a tangled web that is challenging to follow even for someone like myself who has spent a career in complex technical systems. It’s incredibly powerful, but at the same time non-trivial to understand.

Now, let’s see…what connections do I want to have to my LinkedIn profile 😉 ?