February 2012 – Page 15 – Shall Not Be Questioned

Some “Working At Home” Impressions

So with the new job, I work from home 3 days a week, and am in the office Thursday and Friday. This is the first job I’ve had that’s done work from home, but it’s a necessity for me because of how far away corporate HQ is for the company I work, and am part owner of. So how’s working from home working out? I’m a fan. Here are some impressions:

I recover a lot of time not having to commute. With my old job it was an hour and twenty minutes a day lost to the commute, on a good day. I can wake up at 8:30 and be downstairs at my workstation sooner than I would normally be at work. It feels like a lot of recovered time.
After a few days you realize there’s no reason to do your typical day 9-6 day of eight hours straight with an hour lunch break. I’m not much of a 9-5 person anyway, and I’m often most productive at night. When you work from home, you can run errands during the day that at night would take longer, and do the night owl thing with your work.
I do get a little feeling of being cooped up in my office for as long as I’m down there. It’s different than being at work, because you don’t change venues for several days straight. I used to work evenings from home previously, but at least you changed offices in the evening.
Fast, speedy internet is a must. For me, I don’t really notice much of a difference here or there, since FiOS is really nice.
Forget about the stereotype of working in your underwear or pajamas. I’ve found it’s best psychologically to follow a normal morning routine, and head downstairs to the office. Otherwise it feels like the weekend, and it’s hard to get started with the day.

So what am I doing? Experimenting with high-availibility Linux. I’ve managed to convince myself I know what components I’m going to use, so now it’s on to automating the builds with kickstarts and scripts. All I will say about my mission is that we will be building a high-availibility, lights-out data center. I will follow the Google philosophy of “let the computers run everything” with humans only having to get involved with hardware failure, or failures the machines can’t figure out and deal with. Part of that is automated builds; leave no room for errors introduced by feeble humans. I’m also a big white box proponent. We will not be buying expensive SAN equipment from EMC, nor paying the big bucks for Cisco networking equipment, because quite honestly, it’s not necessary to accomplish our goals. My current company shares my philosophy of hiring fewer, skilled administrators, rather than an army of lesser skilled ones that have to stick to the few tools they know. Our philosophy is to figure out what you want the machines to do, and find the right tools to do it, not to work from the tools, and to let that limit your capability. When you adopt that philosophy, you’ll often find that you can save a lot of money using open source solutions that might be harder to setup, but do the same job as an expensive package or device. At my previous job, I had a 384-core HPC Linux cluster, about a dozen or so corporate systems, and a dozen or so workstations, a dozen or so lab instruments, and about 50 desktops. Our IT software licensing costs were, most years, zero, and with the exception of my aging Exchange server, highly available. Â The cost in personnel to maintain all this was the cost of my salary, and a two-day a week part time help desk person to deal with end user non-scientific support (I did scientific support directly). High availability doesn’t have to cost a ton of money, in people or equipment.

Chainsaw Ripping Through the Door

I read about this wrong house raid incident last night, and I have to agree with SayUncle on this one:

Using a chainsaw seems to me to be unnecessarily dangerous and doesnâ€™t lend itself to stealth. Also, if I were sitting around my house and I saw and heard a chainsaw coming through the door, my first thought will not beÂ itâ€™s the police and I should cooperate.

Yeah, I would not think someone chainsawing my door is the cops. Then again, it would have to be an awfully stupid prowler too, considering how much noise that makes.

Winning, Part 254

Susan Komen Foundation teaming up a gun promotional:

Discount Gun Sales is proud to team up with the Susan B. Koman Foundation to offer the Walther P-22 Hope Edition in recognition of Breast Cancer Awareness Month. A portion of each P-22 Hope Edition will be donated to the Seattle Branch of the Susan G. Komen Foundation.

CSGV and their mouth foaming followers are already throwing a hissy fit about it, though apparently they can’t tell the difference between a .22LR Caliber Walther and a Glock. Must suck to be irrelevant.

Proof that F&F Was a Plot to Bring About Gun Control

Dave Hardy links to the smoking gun at the Arizona star. Essentially F&F was concocted by the same people behind the Assault Weapons Ban in the 1990s. The smoking quote:

In an April 2010 e-mail to a colleague, Burke predicted that the operation would have a huge public impact: “It’s going to bring a lot of attention to straw purchasers of assault weapons,” he wrote. “Some of these weapons bought by these clowns in Arizona have been directly traced to murders of elected officials in Mexico by the cartels, so Katie-bar-the-door when we unveil this baby.”

So the response was to traffic more guns, and rack up more dead bodies, then hopefully the American people would wake up and ban these dangerous guns? This guy needs to go to jail.

Wisconsin CCW Working

An armed robber was shot by an armed customer of the store the robber was attempting to rob. One more victim of gun violence for our opponents to light a candle for.

Tactics on the Starbucks Boycott

Arma Borealis has a bit on how our opponents plan to drive their Starbucks Protest. Chris calls it “fake journalism.” That might be the case, but the tactic is smart. They know they can’t beat us with numbers, so they have to beat us with tactics. Their tactic, I don’t think, will change many minds on the issue. I personally don’t like being accosted and dragged into a cause when I’m on my way to do something. I think a lot of people feel the same way.

But what they hope, is that Starbucks will capitulate to them in order to make the unwanted attention go away. These are classic tactics to use in order to shake down a corporation into doing what you want them to do, and generally speaking, it’s effective. Will it work in this case? 11,000+ people on Facebook and still climbing, and this is a purely grassroots effort. I think it’s safe to say we could hit 20 or 30 thousand by the time February 14th rolls around. Those kinds of numbers talk, and what Starbucks surely doesn’t want, are those kinds of numbers turning against them.

Great Dirty Minds Think Alike

I just can’t help it. This is a great headline find by Wyatt:

USAFâ€™s Big Penetrator Needs To Be Harder

I just… There’s not much else that can be said.

What is an Establishment Candidate?

I can’t tell you how many places I’ve read that have people on the farther side of the right spectrum complaining about how Mitt Romney has been “forced” on voters as the GOP nominee. He’s just what the establishment wants. Well what does being the establishment candidate who is forced on us really mean?

It’s a legitimate question to explore since I don’t particularly like him. But, I don’t think forced is an accurate term, nor do I think what is happening with Mitt an example of the establishment anointing a candidate. If you really want to see a case of that happening, look no farther than Pennsylvania.

Consider the Keystone State’s U.S. Senate race this year. There are three reasonably well-known candidates, and one really rich guy who can buy enough ads to make himself well-known. Candidate A from the state’s population center is wealthy, but he’s never run a campaign. He’s only reasonably well-known in political circles because he has tried to run before, but he never actually got any campaigns off the ground since better-known Republicans stepped in and asked him to step aside. Candidate B has run a campaign and came within a very close margin of winning in a district that had voted Democratic for the seat since 1974. He has a national fundraising list to bring to the table, and he has a record with a campaign that could put numbers on the board even in a tough district. Candidate C is a former gubernatorial candidate who really didn’t resonate with GOP voters in his last primary, but he at least has experience trying to run in a statewide race. He would have a statewide donor list, presumably, so that should count for something. Candidate D is just the rich guy who doesn’t seem to bring much else to the table.

So, given all of these factors, you’d think that Candidates B & C would be the likely strongest candidates, right? Well, the state GOP leaders decided that they liked Candidate A. They liked him so much that they will provide him with official party resources in order to win the primary so he can work against other Republicans. Voters will technically have a say in the primary, but they want to make sure that party resources are provided for shoving their choice in our faces before the general election.

That, my friends, is what I call an establishment candidate. When the party quite literally spends official resources to back their personal favorite and possibly use the resources to attack other Republican candidates, that’s not allowing voters to really decide. I had never heard of such a process until I moved to Pennsylvania. It’s not just at the state level. I’ve watched county GOP officials disparage other Republicans who aren’t in their little approved circle and take them to court for minor things. It’s absurd to waste party resources eating our own, but that seems to be the official GOP way in Pennsylvania.

So, considering this example of truly having a candidate financially backed by party resources and picked in a room of party leaders, is Mitt in the same category?

The fact is that Mitt has won 772,064 Republican votes, according to the Wall Street Journal. To me, that means that Republicans are voting for the man. I may not like him, but I’m not going to claim that those 772,000 are all secretly party leaders picking the presidential nominee for the party. They are voters.

NGVAC Ad in Times Square on Starbucks Protest

Jacob is wondering who’s paying for the ad on the Times Square jumbo-tron. My guess is that, as a 501(c)(3), they got some PSA time, meaning that PRNewswire ran it for them gratis. Not that it matters, as their boycott is still going to be made of epic fail. Last night, the Starbucks Appreciation Event topped 10,000 people on Facebook, and is now well on its way to 11,000. If everyone who went to that event spent $10 on average, that’s $100,000 more in sales Starbucks will have that day that they wouldn’t have had previously. While Starbucks grosses about 26 million in a day, this isn’t chump change for a day’s work.

If you’re not sure how you can spend ten bucks at Starbucks, Barron Barnett came up with a great ideaÂ of buying a few bags of Starbucks for the troops overseas. Follow the link for details if you’re stationed overseas or know someone who is stationed overseas that might like a little taste of home.

California Shall-Issue Ballot Controversy Resolved

And update from Gene Hoffman on the issue mentioned yesterday. It would seem all parties, including Dave Clark, the initiative sponsor, and Ignatius Piazza, founder and director of Front Sight, have come to an agreement that the measure will be pulled this cycle so that court cases can proceed. We are pleased that everyone managed to come together and do the right thing here.