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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Life

  • A Duck In Vegas, Day Two

    If nothing else, I ate far better today than I did yesterday. (Did I pig out at the poolside party last night? Yes. Which mostly made up for not getting lunch at all.)

    Today featured the bulk of the Kaseya Connect conference material. Yes, there’s more tomorrow, but today we received the keynote speech and the motivational speaker (Jim Abbott, a baseball pitcher born without a right hand, quite a storyteller with a good message but not necessarily the best fit for a room full of people who don’t follow baseball, even if they’ve heard of it at all) and most of the Big Product Announcements.

    So, what’s on my shopping list?

    • Enterprise Monitoring: They ditched Zabbix (a product I generally like, but admit that the configuration is somewhat arcane) for Intellipool, a company that Kaseya acquired just for this purpose. The demo looks fantastic, and will probably obviate the need for the quirky, cumbersome Network Discovery module. (Um… whoops?)
    • Policy Management: If we can get rid of the tangled mess of templates and replace it with policies that we can apply consistently and automatically based on service-level orgs and client groups, I’ll be able to provide a far more consistent management experience. We want it, oh yes, we do.
    • Online Backup: We’re using Ahsay right now, but if Kaseya can integrate an offsite folder backup solution and let us pick our own destination, I’ll try to get the bosses to buy it. Right now, however, it’s Amazon S3 only… and we like having end-to-end control far too much to go for that.
    • Mobile Device Management: I almost skipped this presentation, but a live demo of deploying the agent to an iPhone and an Android, backing up and restoring contacts, and wiping the iPhone completely convinced me that we may have a chance at selling this to certain C-level types among our clientele.

    Meanwhile, staying in a fairly posh hotel provided some amusement. When they came in to tidy up while I was off at conference sessions, they not only made the bed and replaced the towels as I expected, they also took the time to line up and organize the little travel bottles of toiletries I’d left clustered (but upright, I’m not a total slob) on the sink. Cute, guys.

    Tomorrow morning I get to pack up, check out, get through the last day of conferences, head to the airport, check through security, wait a few hours, then finally fly home.

    I can’t wait to be home. I’ve had some fun here but after tomorrow I won’t want to travel again for a good long time…

  • A Duck In Vegas, Day One

    Years ago I became the “Kaseya Guru” where I work. So, when the opportunity came for a most-expense-paid trip to Kaseya’s annual conference, I decided to give it a whirl. New experiences broaden the mind, and there’s value to us in hobnobbing with our contacts at the company as well as chatting with other users. Great idea!

    Unfortunately, this meant flying. To Vegas. Days before payday.

    The flight itself wasn’t actually terrible, but getting out of bed at 5:30am on a Sunday is nearly against my religion. (Yes, I’m an atheist. Shut up. It’s been a long damned day.) Then there’s the security theater to get through, please take off your shoes, sir you forgot to remove your laptop from the bag, and so on. After all that, wait. The plane ride itself wasn’t terrible, as these things go. I’ll never be a fan of air travel but I can manage. Descents do bad things to my stress levels and innards, mind you.

    Let’s talk about shuttle buses and Vegas. For $6.50, you get to be hauled from the airport to your hotel… eventually. Unless you’re staying at Hooters, which was the first stop on the itinerary. I’m sure those newlyweds are in for decades of wedded bliss, you betcha. The Four Seasons? Last stop. Oh, and along the way, some guy tries to sell you on various amenities available, complete with stand-up-comedian patter. Dude, I’ve been up since oh-dark-thirty, shut up and let me get to my hotel in peace.

    And then I learn a priceless, by which I mean expensive, lesson about hotel reservations: If you don’t have a proper credit card but only a debit card, they want to “authorize a charge” amounting to possibly hundreds of dollars, in anticipation of your use of, say, the bar in your room. Great, but I don’t get paid ’til Thursday, I don’t have $300 sitting in my account right now. Even if I cleared out savings, the money wouldn’t be actually available until tomorrow. After some back-and-forth, they settled for swiping my card and going on a “cash” basis in return for my agreement not to use anything from the bar. (Like I was going to? Three bucks for a candy bar, are you mental?) Fine, great, I’m sure I’m the last person on the planet to know this. I’m sure the hotel staff are having a nice chuckle somewhere at the rube from Portland. Whatever.

    Of course, right now I’m craving a candy bar, or pretty much anything at all. See, I didn’t buy any food on the plane, breakfast was at 6:30 this morning, and as I write this nearly 12 hours later I don’t expect to be provided dinner for at least another 90 minutes.

    At least the two hours of “pre-conference” material was interesting, consisting of a Q&A session with various technical types. Good stuff. Now, can I eat something, please?

  • Electronic Bookery

    So… I may or may not have purchased one of these earlier this week. Ahem. There’s an unconfirmed rumor that this may-or-may-not event transpired after playing with a particular person‘s recently acquired similar gadget.

    At any rate, I’m amused at one particular aspect of the “ebook” phenomenon. I understand that the way most dead-tree books will become a pile of ones and zeros is through being scanned and treated with an Optical Character Recognition program, then (allegedly) proofread by a human being for error correction. The problem seems to stem from the fact that proofreaders get tired and/or bored partway through a job.

    Case in point? Fred Saberhagen’s “First Book Of Swords.” Toward the end of the book I saw an entire page in which the letter “I” was turned into the number “1”, each and every time. Earlier, I saw a lowercase “y” turned into a lowercase “v”. These are understandable glitches on the part of the OCR software, but a proofreader paying any kind of attention should’ve caught them.

    I don’t know what to make of another little quirk, namely that text in italics tends to be several point sizes larger than the normal text around it. This could be a problem with the particular book rather than the platform. Time will tell. I’ve only purchased two ebooks in my life so far and the other one’s not downloaded yet.

    Ahem. That is, hypothetically speaking… aw, who am I kidding? Yes, yes, I’ m a sheep. I own a Nook Color. Baaaaaa.

    So how is the device itself? Generally I like it. I mean, sure, if I was just going to read books all day I’d have gone for the regular e-ink device and called it good… not to mention saving $100 and potential eye strain. A big selling point for me, however, is having a 7″ screen WiFi device with a decent, working web browser. I can read books and surf the Internet? SOLD.

    And to answer the geeks out there… no, I’m not going to “root” my Nook Color and turn it into a full-on Android tablet. I like the machine just the way it is, and don’t want to “break” things for the sake of being extra-geeky.

    Yes, yes. I’ll turn in my alpha-geek membership card now. Big deal.

  • A Gel-Free Zone

    Somewhen between six and eight weeks after the last time I get shorn, I go in and tell them to do it to me again.

    This is all well and good, and a couple years ago I found a franchised salon-type shop whose people do good work. Every now and then, however, I get a new person who doesn’t know what I don’t like, and because I’m not paying 100% attention to what they’re doing I find myself with styling gunk in my hair by the end of the visit.

    The irony, if that’s the correct word to use because gods forbid I misuse that word in this day and age, lies in the fact that when I was running around with much shorter hair I gelled the hell out of it every morning. I was going for that youthful spiky-haired look or some-such. One day I grew up, grew out the hair and threw out the goop.

    All of this is to say that I spent all day yesterday going to comb my hand through my hair on subconscious reflex and ending up with sticky fingers. Damned hair gel, anyway.

  • State Of The Karel, April 2011

    I let it get away from me again, didn’t I?

    Let’s be honest: Not much newsworthy happens in my life. Each week looks mostly like the one before it. The big difference in the last few weeks is that I spent several of them very, very sick. Two rounds of the Death Blarg Of Blargish Death takes a lot out of you. Also, I burned through all of my “for-spending” tax refund money before the end of March. One shiny new 37″ flat-screen TV, one new computer full of LEDs, two flat-screen computer displays, and a bunch of random odds and ends later, and I have… more stuff. I did spend some of the money on important things, mind you… I own several more books than I did at the start of the year, for instance! I ran out of money before I could acquire a new bed, but, them’s the breaks.

    Work is flying me to Vegas early in May for a vendor conference. I’m 100% not thrilled about flying, let alone to Vegas, in the Age Of Being Groped By Security Apes. But them’s the breaks. It should be an interesting conference, hopefully worth the indignity and bother.

    The webcomic is winding up its second year of production, and I’m looking forward to taking a short break in May to recharge my creative batteries. I’ve also been reading up on photographic tricks and techniques, which I intend to put into practice going into Year Three. I also need to upgrade the shooting environment. In particular, my desktop is looking a bit the worse for wear.

    My adorable rugrats are pretty much all grown up now. One’s most of the way through his first year at DigiPen up in the Seattle area, and the other is out of school and looking to start working so she can get out on her own. I’m proud of them both, albeit for wildly different reasons.

    In addition to the usual couple-times-per-week diversion that comes from playing City of Heroes, some of my gaming time goes to Puzzle Quest 2. Think of it as Bejeweleder’s Gate, if you like: It’s a gem-matching game grafted onto a computer-RPG. That may sound absurd, but trust me, it works and it’s addictive as hell.

    So… what about you? What’s new in your life this spring so far?

  • Two hundred of them?

    I can’t believe that I’ve posted two hundred of these things over the course of nearly two years. Even more mind-boggling is that a few dozen people read them every week.

    So, I’ve accomplished that, at least.

    Wow.

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