life – Page 52 – chuck.goolsbee.org

“Little Oil” is back in business.

Ambient temps in the Seattle area have raised over 40ÂºF in the last week… the rains are back with a vengeance. My home WVO filtering setup is moving once again… those cold temps wedged it pretty solid for most of December. Gravity was not doing the job and I had to use the hand pump to get it through the filters. Talk about an upper-body workout! I think I managed to squeeze about 7 gallons out after working at it for 3 weeks. I’d go out to the barn at night and slowly turn the crank on the pump and watch a very thin stream come out of the spout. It was slow, hard work. An hour’s crank-turning would produce maybe a half-liter or so of usable oil. I brought my powerbook out and watched bittorrent downloaded copies of the BBC’s “Top Gear” show to occupy my mind while I worked. Once, as I was changing the pump from one barrel to another I dumped about 100ml of oil onto the laptop(!) I freaked out and imagined the damage should it move from where it landed (on the area that is blank below the keyboard, and also on the trackpad and “mouse button” of my 15″ aluminum powerbook) but thankfully it remained in its honey-like consistency and barely spread. I was able to mop it up. No damage at all.

Saturday, with temps in the low 60Âºs F (yes, low sixties on Christmas eve!) the stuff was free flowing once again. I pulled 10 gallons out with ease, and moved about 30 gallons through the filters and into the storage barrel. Today it is in the high 40s. If the temps stay this warm I’ll be able to work through my big backlog.

Christopher, who is now taller than me (he has now assumed, I believe the title of “The Tallest Goolsbee Ever”… Austan if you are out there let me know if any folks on your branch of the Goolsbee family exceed 6′) has been a big help in keeping the whole process moving. To help alleviate my back injury getting worse, he is able to assist in doing the heavy lifting. Oil buckets for the initial dump into my “get the big chunks of french fry bits out” filter… which is a polypropylene sock attached to the bottom of a funnel. Though like any 15yr old, he complains about having to do the work, once he gets moving he seems to enjoy himself. It gives us a chance to talk to each other as well.

Library Limbo, solved.

Found a book (borrowed it from my son really)…

Castles of Steel.

Logical extension of the last one Lusitania as many of the characters are the same, along with the time-frame and issues. Should be a good read. BTW: My paternal grandfather served in the US Navy during WWI, on one of these Dreadnoughts. In a classic variation on the oxymoron of Military Intelligence, his task was that of a lookout. He stared at the horizon for 8 hours a day.

The ironic part was that he was literally half-blind. Go figure.

Library Limbo

I love to read. I have since I was a kid. I almost always have a book with me, and read it when I have any spare time. I usually have a queue of good books to read waiting for me to finish whatever I am working on at the moment. I finished Lusitania last week, and had nothing queued up next. A friend unexpectedly sent me some books from Amazon for Christmas (Thanks John!) so I know I have some stuff to dig into in about a week. I also have bought some books for my older son, who is a voracious reader too. He loves John Keegan, so I bought a few of his works for under the tree. So I should have the first few months of 2006 covered. In the meantime I have nothing to read, and it is an odd feeling.

I’d like to dust off Smith’s Wealth of Nations again, but it is too much for a week, especially a busy week (my youngest’s birthday is this week, and I have a ton of stuff to do at work)… not to mention all that Holiday stuff. Any suggestions for some nice quick, thought-provoking reads? Regular readers of this site know that I prefer the History and Philosophy sections of the bookstore… though a nice biography or novel is not outside the realm of possibilty. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

Getting things done.

I had a meeting today at 4pm (yeah, I know it is Friday) at work concerning a business deal. I’ll leave out specific details but it was supposed to be about fixing some problems. I’m not a big fan of meetings but this one was required because the email exchanges were not making things better, in fact it was making things worse. So the hope was to get everyone involved into one room (6 people), and address a list of details and get them crossed of EVERYONE’s list right then and there. I like meetings if stuff can get accomplished, otherwise I avoid them.

Unfortunately it didn’t go well. Five people showed up, having done all their prep work, and ready to meet, but one person arrived with seemingly no desire to get anything done. Well not really, it seemed that they were there to PREVENT anything from getting done. Instead of following the agenda, they wandered, interrupted, and actively prevented any issue from being resolved. It was very frustrating.

Thankfully that person left the meeting, and at least a small amount of progress was made. Very strange experience though.

Delivery Boy

I shuttled a replacement server up to Vancouver yesterday. Our old DNS server “willow” finally died. Since I live halfway there I drove it up. Everything went well except for two things.

#1: I can’t find my keycard for the Peer1 facility.

No big deal, I call the NOC and a guy comes down to let me in. I walk around from the door I usually go in on the east side of the building down to the loading dock on the north side. Of course I am carrying this 40lb server. Ugh. Not good for my just barely healed back. Then the Peer1 NOC guy locks us out of the loading dock, so we trudge up the loading dock ramps, and around to the SE corner of the building… uphill all the way. My back was really hurting and by the time we got to the elevator inside the building lobby the Peer1 NOC guy must have noted the pain on my face and volunteered to carry the server for a while. We arrive in the datacenter and I’m still in my “work clothes” and a gore-tex jacket. It is HOT in the DC. I hand him the server back (we had swapped again as he unlocked doors) and stripped off the jacket. Thankfully our little server enclosure (a wire mesh “hockey locker”) has an HVAC vent right above it so while I’m working I have cold air blowing on me.

#2: The damn server doesn’t fit in the enclosure!

This trend of making servers 1U high and as long as an aircraft carrier is just completely out of control. This box is a Dell server, and it is about 1″ deeper than the rack it is in. I end up having to stand in on its nose. Plus I have to carve off the RJ-45 cable boot in order to thread the cable into the deeply recessed jack. I guess I’ll talk to Peer1 about exchanging our rack for a different one.

So now my back is hurt again, and our server is mounted vertically.

Finished 1945

I finished reading my latest book (see links on right) as I lay around all weekend recovering from my back problems. Here is a quick mini-review:

Very readable, well researched summary of the critical year 1945. Dallas fills in the Political, and Economic strategies in play by the major powers (UK, US, & USSR, along with France, Germany, and what is left of Poland) along with the usual Military history. It makes for fascinating reading, especially for those of us brought up in the USA. Much that is left out of Military histories and the mythology we are accustomed to here in the US are explored: De Gaulle and the French political (Vichy/the Communists) situation. The broad economic and political maneuvers by the US, UK, & USSR. The extent to which the USSR had no illusions as to the “alliance” with the western powers, and how well they were ahead of “us” in terms of embedding intelligence operatives into the foreign governments of all their “enemies” (From Germany to the US).

I always wondered how, in the grand “war councils” between FDR, Churchill, and Stalin the subject of the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 was never discussed. This book answers that and more.

The brief window of time in 1990 when the Soviet archives were opened for western view for the first time has produced a fantastic opportunity for historians to fill in sections of the 20th Century’s jigsaw puzzle. This book benefits from that data significantly. If you are at all interested in history, I suggest you read it.

It’s official, WRD is world’s laziest blogger

Bill Dickson has gone one full year between blog posts.

When I first met Bill, he told me he wanted to be a writer. A very great man, James D. Howze, who was an Art Professor of mine, (who I studied 2D drawing under my Freshman year) once told me you create ART by making marks on paper. So Bill, I suggest you start banging your keyboard.

You are a far better writer than I could ever be Bill. Start writing again!