Crap mashup, but inspired choice…

OK, this is a completely crappy mashup, but I have to say the first part wonderfully mimics the crappy stuff that Microsoft produces out of their Marketing & Advertising groups (trust me, I know… I used to work for a Microsoft marketing vendor!)… but the second half, where it falls apart is video from a GREAT 80s sci-fi flick that I loved. It i now in my NetFlix queue.

Another site on my blog roll…

I’m going to add another site to my “blogroll” today, namely The RPM Blog.

RPM is a noted restoration shop in Vergennes, Vermont. I have gotten to know the Markowskis through my participation in several of Rich & Jean Taylor’s Vintage Rallies, where the big black RPM truck & trailer serve as ‘sweep’ vehicle. Steve & Eben from RPM saved our butts during the New England 2000 by fishing a clutch hinge pin from the bell housing and replacing it in-situ using surgical tools(!) This was accomplished overnight and the car ran fine for many years afterwards!

RPM has built a reputation for excellence over the years, and Peter & Stephan are great guys. Being so far away it is unlikely I would ever have the opportunity to do business with them, but if you are in New England and need service I’d highly recommend them.

I have their blog in my RSS feed because they often have unique and interesting machines in the shop and document their projects there. At the moment they are dealing with one of those legendary dream cars… a Miura. Go have a look.

Entropy on the path to a Christmas Tree


Above: The boys at Tannenbaum Tree Farm circa 2002. Our home is off beyond the treeline behind them.

We moved out to the boonies 10 years ago not long after our return from the UK. We were pleasantly surprised to find many tree farms around our house. The first few years we just walked to the nearest of them, Tannenbaum Tree Farm to pick and cut our holiday tree. For several years we’d walk a path through a 44 acre wood that existed behind our property and exit right at the tree farm. The family that ran Tannenbaum had created an ideal world for the acquisition of Christmas trees. A log shelter with a warm fire in a cast-iron stove. Hot cider. Candy canes. Some small decorative gifts for sale. Custom-built tree-netting stands between the shelter and the parking area. Just grab your saw and go pick your tree. They had a great assortment of VERY nice trees. Like I said in the beginning we would walk over and cut our tree and carry it home. One year we even did it while it was snowing. It was sort of magical.

It was obvious that they treated their customers like family and many people would drive from as far away as Seattle every year to pick their tree. People there were always smiling and happy, even if it was wet, or cold, or snowing. Magical.


Above: Sue & Nick at Tannenbaum Tree Farm circa 2002

Then the 44 acre wood was clear cut and some developer built a housing development on it. So we would all just pile into the old pickup truck and go drive ‘around the block’ (though that is about a 2 mile drive) to Tannenbaum and select our tree. They would always ask if we needed it netted, and we always answered with “No, we live just over there” (pointing east towards the mountains).

This year we received a post card just before Thanksgiving from the Tannenbaum Tree farm that said they were no longer selling trees, and thanked us for our years of patronage. One of our little family traditions was lost!

This weekend the family decided that we had to get our tree now, so they pulled me away from my computer and we went off in search of a tree. All the Christmas Tree Farms that littered the neighborhood have all vanished! Every last one has been replaced with housing developments. We saw a sign advertising one on the road down to Granite Falls, so Nick & I went there. Boy were we disappointed. Scraggly little trees that only Charlie Brown could love, and all of them outrageously priced. I can’t recall paying more than about $40 for a tree and Tannenbaum, and in fact most years it was less than $30. Not a single tree at this other place was less than $35 and all the reasonably good looking or tall ones were priced between $75 & $150! Not only that but it was all out in a muddy field behind a travel trailer. Not what I would remotely call “magical”.

We gave up on tree farms… ok tree farm.. and drove into town and grabbed a tree at the grocery store. A fine looking and quite tall Douglas Fir. (Logical since one fell over in our yard exactly one year ago!) I paid $20 for it.

On our way home Nick & I drove past Tannenbaum, and their trees are there, but they are closed. Out in front is a Snohomish County Land Use Permit application sign. Obviously the site of another housing development, coming soon.

It is official: The Boonies have devolved into the Suburbs.

Ramps and Staircases. The economic realities of the data center business.

Econ 101

Note: This is something I zipped off just now to “Server Specs: A SearchDataCenter.com blog” after I had a conversation with Matt Stansberry via IM. He was bugging me about not writing anything for a while, and I claimed how busy I was. Then we were just casually conversing about some industry trends when I made my “ramps and staircases” analogy. He said something like: “If you had typed that in WP instead of IM it would be published!”

True enough. So Sunday before we went out to get our holiday tree I cranked this out. After sleeping on it I added a few bits, then had a couple of trusted friends (writers both) rip up my grammar and wording and put it back together looking much more polished (Thanks Bill & John!) So if market analysis is your thing click “more”…

Continue reading “Ramps and Staircases. The economic realities of the data center business.”

I just got pushed…

…over to the Anti-DRM side of the debate.

Chris is compiling a Christmas gift package to send to his Chilean host family. He wanted to include a few DVDs for his host parents. He asked me to help him buy some online. I vaguely recall that DVDs might have some sort of region-based anti-copying bit in them… something that would make a DVD bought in one part of the world un-playable in another part of the world. I look around and sure enough, it is true. Not only is it true, but South America is a completely different region with regards to DVD. Oh well.

Ironically the only way we could realistically send them a DVD is to copy one on my computer, remove the region encoding, and rip it back to a DVD… basically PIRATING IT. Go figure.

Has this anti-pirating technology stopped any video “piracy”?? No. You can go online and find software copies of any movie you would ever want to see, available for download. Even movies that are currently in theaters! But here is a scenario where we’d like to legitimately BUY a DVD, but because the Studios/MPAA/whoever are so damn paranoid of piracy they’ve made it so we can’t… so the only thing we can resort to is piracy! What moron thought this scheme up?

Up until today I had never really had a real stance on the whole DRM debate. Mostly because it had not affected me yet. Yes, I’ve bought many songs from iTunes, but have never had a situation where I could not use it the way I wanted. Gifts are not an issue either because Apple has made it easy to give iTunes data away as a gift. Too bad the bozos who make DVDs haven’t figured out how we want to use them.

Oh well. Our online search came up empty, so we went to a store and scoured the racks for something interesting without the region coding hard wired into the disc. It was damn near impossible to find anything!

The morons in Hollywood really need to reverse their cranial-rectal inversion.