We lost Mia today. I’ve always read posts like this with some amount of indifference because in the back of my head I am thinking “this is just an animal” and “this is not a person”. And so I forgive you for feeling the same way. I understand that response.
This stream of thoughts is really for me, and it is also for my wife and kids and anyone else who feels the loss of our “just a cat” as acutely as I am feeling it right now. But maybe you’ve been here, too, with your pets, at the end of a chapter in your own life. Here is a rememberance for us.
In Decemeber of 2014 I transitioned from fifteen years of being a developer into being one of the people managers on a really amazing team here at Red Hat. All told, my first year in this role has been a tremendous learning experience for me. If you are interested in becoming a part of a team like this one, here is some advice for you based on the dozens of interviews I have conducted over my first 15 months.
My primary workhorse right now is an HP Omen running Fedora 22. Thinking and talking about how to restore my work environment from a total failure, I came to the conclusion that there are three primary things that need to be preserved…
I almost feel like a traitor, which is a weird way to feel about consumer electronics. But my next laptop is not going to be a MacBook. Our current development work on OpenShift requires easy access to a docker service, and Boot2docker just doesn’t cut it…
Family Sharing provides users with a way to share purchases from their iCloud/iTunes account with up to five other people. Additionally, this feature enables you to create iCloud accounts for children, and to manage the purchases and content available to those accounts.
iTunes has been around a lot longer than this feature, and so for years now, people have had to a different means to share app purchases across multiple users. The most common solution is pretty straightforward; create one iTunes account that is shared by multiple people. Apple supports this approach, too: on any Mac or iOS device, you can use one account for your iCloud stuff and a separate one for your iTunes stuff…
Ello is a social platform that has been the subject of some buzz recently. Either by design or by accident, Ello is squarely positioned as the anti-Facebook, which immediately places it in a similar space in people’s minds. That’s a great deal for Ello, because feature-wise they have a long way to go before the can really throw down: no mobile app, no OAuth, no API. Ello claims to be built on a Freemium model that will sustain the company without them resorting to selling user info; but only time will tell.
A moment of clarity from the folks at HuffPo…
> Here’s the best part: When you detach happiness from achievement, these five things that happen are the key ingredients to success. Disconnecting happiness from achievement is the best way to achieve anything…
Just tuning in? Have a look at Part 1 to find out how I installed Fedora 20 on a MacBook Air and why I am so interested in trying to duplicate or even surpass the user experience that I previously enjoyed with OS X.
A little background here: I have been a Mac enthusiast for a number of years now. I would not say that I am religious about OS X, but if the OS X user experience is a philosophical application of “opinionated software”, then I find myself in agreement with most of the opinions that the Apple UX team has expressed.
However, I am also an open source developer. I’d like to believe that it is possible to create a similar and possibly even superior experience with a Linux-based desktop environment. And lo, this is what lead me, a few weeks ago, to get Fedora 20 running on a MacBook Air. If you’re interested in trying the same thing, check out Matt Hicks’ invaluable blog post on setting things up.
Over a series of blog posts I am digging into my impressions of the Fedora 20 user experience as I work through this total switch-over.
Bastion shook his head, and the ghastly images faded away. Glancing up, he could see that the others were watching him. No one was shocked or concerned; they wore their professional detachment like masks. He blinked, glanced up at the cold winter sun through the tree canopy, and then back to the dead forest floor. Signs, patterns, stories. Two people had come this way, one supporting the other. Bastion read their desperation and their determination in lurching footprints that broke the frozen carpet of leaves. He read it in the dried pools of blood. A cold sweat had sprung up on the back of Bastions neck, but he made a broad sweep of his hand and began walking again, deeper into the woods. Taking the cue, the others started walking as well, spread evenly in a line perpendicular to Bastions course.
My recipe for not losing important stuff on my home desktop system…
I’ve inherited a project that is seeing some performance issues. We knew this was at least partly to blame on the UI, but most of the problem is down in the application. Fine; we’ve got a plan for the application-level issue and that’ll get solved. But right now, I’ve been picking through the UI because even though inspection with FireBug reveals that the site is loading at a reasonable clip, it doesnt seem to be rendering the main page until every last linked resource is loaded in the browser.
The quiet evening stands still; a tapestry A history woven in sodium light A memory
Hospitals never used to bother me; I would follow my Dad to the nurses station Wait quietly for him to conduct his rounds and watch people get better.
You never got better here And I’m wearing this stupid yellow band Like it matters
I’m sure Lance is sorry for us
I’m sorry that I was never sad at funerals But they keep getting closer They hurt more now
My search and rescue team, and more specifically, one of our most capable and dedicated members, got some great press in this article. If you live in New England and are interested in volunteering with a search and rescue team, check out the Central Massachusetts Search and Rescue Team!
Last Friday, my dad performed the last surgery of a career that has spanned over thirty years. By my conservative guess, based on a minimum of two scheduled surgeries per week plus countless emergency room calls, his total career count would have to be somewhere in the vicinity of 5000 operations. For the obvious reason that I have no place in an operating room, I never saw his work first hand, but I have looked over his shoulder at the never-ending x-rays of anonymous reconstructed knees, hips and hands. To me, they were bones and screws, plates and stitches. To him, they were his craft, his passion, his profound responsibility.
Got this idea from drama_kween - here’s a quote from each of 15 different movies that I like. I’ve picked some fairly obscure ones (movies and quotes); good luck with your guesses. When you’re out of guesses, you can follow the links to the movies on IMDB.
We fascists are the only true anarchists. Your effort to remain what you are is what limits you. Power is tearing human minds apart and putting them back together in new shapes of your own choosing. I’m not in the business. I am the business. Look, I don’t know nothing about you; you don’t know nothing about me. I don’t know if you’re stupid, or some kind of genius. All I know is that I need to get out of here, and you got the gun. So I’m asking you, for the second time, let me go my way here. Look at this. Look at what they make you give. I call it performance art, but my friend Ariel calls it wasting time. History will decide. Love humiliates you. Hatred cradles you. I gotta hold on to my angst. I preserve it because I need it. It keeps me sharp, on the edge, where I gotta be. What do I think about the U.S. involvement in the war? We should win it. This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and well be lucky to live through it. I’m trying to understand our world. I dont deal with petty materialists like you. Well I, for one, am v-v-very interested to see w-w-what’s going to happen next. Mr. Singer. What an appropriate name for a man who can’t shut up. Death is… whimsical… today.
Thursday morning we discovered serious water damage in our living room ceiling, directly below the upstairs bathroom. Annika called the insurance company and they had their emergency response crew out to assess the damage around 5 on the same day. They did an exploratory look around the damage area and brought in some serious dehumidifiers to dry out the wet portions of the house. The response crew then told us to get a plumber in, and the plumbing crew gave us the lowdown: All of the old, cast-iron plumbing between the fixtures in our upstairs bathroom out to the road has to go. The source of the leak was the soil stack itself, which has a half-inch hole rusted through it.
I sent out mail to a bunch of folks today to let them know that our home phone is offline for the time being. If I forgot to mail you, well, our home phone is offline for the time being.
Well, that was a bad call. SunRocket basically imploded this week, and I’m unlikely to see a prorated return on my flat $200 for a year of service. So now I’m on the fence; I’d sure hate to come crawling back to Vonage in time to watch them implode the same way.
Elena passed away at 12:55 this morning. She was surrounded by her family and close friends. She stayed with us long enough to see her sister Maria who had, at Elena’s encouragement, followed through with plans to make a two-week trip to Africa. Maria arrived back at Logan Airport at 10:30 in the evening and set foot in the house at 12:30 a.m.
I dreaded the notion that Elena was fighting to stay until her sister’s safe return, but we are all thankful that the family could have that chance to be together. My heart is broken for all of the people that Elena has left behind. I am honored to have known someone who could face such a horrible disease with equal measures of grace and dignity. I’ll post again when I know more about further arrangements. Thank you to everyone who has reached out to me, to Annika, and to the Nilson family.