Greetings to all…Happy and Safe Holidays!
I have posted my annual year in review for those of you that care. It has been an eventful and adventurous year. Read more by following the Year in Review link above. I hope that you and yours are healthy, wealthy, and wise.
Had a bit o’ the Christmas cheer today with my parents, sister, brother-in-law, and nephew. We had to celebrate early. Broke out the presents. Ate roast beef. I enjoyed it greatly!
I was in LA on Wednesday, 5 December, with an old friend to see The Cult at the Wiltern Theatre in LA. The Wiltern and adjacent 12-story Pellissier Building are an Art Deco landmark, according to Wikipedia…read more. They are on Wilshire Boulevard at the western edge of Korea Town. That should have been good for my buddy and I since we have both spent a fair amount of time in Korea.
It wasn’t. We got into the city early to beat the traffic…it is as a bad as you have heard it is. Nonetheless we got perfect parking and had time to kill so of course we went looking for a bar. As I noted earlier, we were in Korea Town. There was not a bar within six or eight blocks east or west of the Wiltern on Wilshire that was open. Finally, in some kind of DT brain flash, I see a UPS guy moving some parcels down the sidewalk. I figure a UPS dude probably knows a fair amount about places on his route be they eateries, bars, clean crappers, or whatever. Sure enough, he sends us right around the corner to the Caffe Brass Monkey .
Little did we know it was a karaoke place. There was some talent but the action started at 4:00 in the afternoon and the drinks, $5 for a Bud at that time, are reported to double after 9:00 PM when things really get hopping. Google it for more info. Supposedly there have been, and might be more, sightings…of Hollywood talent.
Anyhow, we dropped some coin for a few drinks and headed back down Wilshire to the venue. The concert was awesome. I was like a fifteen year old screaming and singing. Got my voice back about two days afterward.
Bottom line though…I owe it all to Brown for directing us to a place where we could get a beer to start with.
There are no use in the title nor were any a use harmed because of this, excuse.
More to the point, go quickly to the Washington Post article, “A Park-in -Waiting That Needs a Push“. Follow the link at the end of the article to comment on whether or not Fort Monroe should be released to commercial concerns or reverted to the hands of the National Park Service.
I have been going down to tidewater in Virginia for years, since my sister moved there in the early nineties. Fort Monroe was one of the first recreational facilities I remember going to down there back then. I have been there for picnics and biked, walked, and hung around. My younger sister got married in the chapel …
We all stayed at the Chamberlain Hotel. It was quite the party as best I can remember. I was a Buddhist for like two weeks after. Now I am Shinto.
Copy and paste this quote, from an article in the Washington Post on Sunday November 25 by Steven T. Corneliussen into your email before you send it:
“Citizens can empower the Army to instruct Kaine and the Virginia panel to respect all of Fort Monroe as what it is: a national historic landmark ranking with — and maybe someday outranking — Monticello and Mount Vernon.”
I really couldn’t see the following front page headline and not have something to say…. “Eyes Will Be on Bush At Talks on Mideast,” from the Washington Post, 24 November, 2007.
Many people are happy to lay back and relax on the day after Thanksgiving Day in the U.S. Many are more motivated to go shopping. Some of us, go to work.
After requesting, for more than three years at my facility, some total network and server downtime, I finally got it today. I hope that my coworkers are enjoying their time off. I made it impossible for anyone to do anything that required much more than being able to log onto their work computer, if they could even do that.
As ever, with many projects, they take at least as long as you comfortably expect they will and often take much longer than your wildest expectations. All I wanted to do was swap out four or five switches in the rack, install GBIC’s in the new switches, clean up the the patch cabling for the 200 or so data and voice runs, test connectivity, and leave around 1600.
That did not happen. It was an eleven hour ball buster but I am comfortable with it as it is for the moment. I didn’t get some of the second NIC and the ILO port connected. I never even touched the voice rack. I think that the data side looks pretty good. I have shut down five switch stacks in the last week. I have more switches than I know what to do with…that’s a change!
Here is some evidence of switch clean up.
Before:
Between:
After:
I don’t have much to say since I am too tired to rant. I should be enjoying this week what with the four day weekend and such but I can’t get up for it really. We have no great gathering of relatives, for the second year in a row, not that we really have ever had one. I have to work late Wednesday night and all day Friday so the holiday seems like a wash. I should plan something exciting on Saturday to make up for it.
I hope that your holiday is filled with happy friends, family, and good food. Be safe.
I respect the Dalai Lama as much as anyone I can think of. Exiled from his own country, he is still the object of adoration and respect for Tibetans and Buddhists world-wide. George W. Bush should be exiled from his own country which he has led into a position of hatred and disrespect around the world. Look at some of what the Dalai Lama says in a Washington Post op-ed published October 21, 2007, titled “Brute force can never subdue the basic human desire for freedom”
He speaks of the benefit of non-violent opposition as compared to the benefit of violent opposition. “One may sometimes feel that one can solve a problem quickly with force, but such success is often achieved at the expense of the rights and welfare of others.” Can you say Iraqi intervention?
“We need to embrace a more realistic approach to dealing with human conflicts, an approach that is in tune with a new reality of heavy interdependence in which the old concepts of “we” and “they” are no longer relevant. The very idea of total victory for one’s own side and the total defeat of one’s enemy is untenable. In violent conflicts, the innocent are often the first casualties, as the war in Iraq and Sudan’s Darfur crisis painfully remind us.” Can you say antithesis of George W. Bush? Add Somalia to that list of crises…
The Dalai Lama goes on to speak about religion, the role of women, care for the environment, and education, things that touch all of us. Please read the article and, please, care.
In Charlotte Allen’s Washington Post op-ed, “Back off! I’m Not Dead Yet. I Don’t Want a Living Will. Why Should I?,” dated October 14, 2007, she speaks about the bad feeling she got when, preparing to go for surgery, she was repeatedly asked if she had a living will. Charlotte expressed her doubts about the benefit of a living will and about how it actually be enforced.
There might be many people involved in trying to interpret the will but the creator is likely to have no say. Unfortunately, there are likely to be enough different interpretations of the patients desires to make them impossible to agree upon, from the point of view of the physicians and family.
That is neither here nor there for the point of this entry. One thing that particularly freaked out Ms. Allen, was an anonymous call she got about hospices, when she was visiting her 93 year old father who had prostrate cancer, in which the caller said, “Then, what you have to do is take them to a hospice. That’s what they did with my mother. They’ll put him on a morphine drip, and he’ll be gone in a few days.”
Reading this sent a chill up my spine. My grandmother Chase, who was in her early 90’s, passed away at the managed care center in her retirement community late this summer. She had recently been put under hospice care. She was in much pain from bed sores and screamed horribly when she had to move or was moved.
She had been on Oxycotin briefly when, as I understand it, the hospice representative suggested she should be given morphine. She had only been on that for a few days when my sister was called and informed that a chaplain had been in to pray with grandma in the afternoon. I got a call that evening to say she had passed away. Oh, the chill is back…
I pulled up at the light right next to my office when I was leaving work last night and noticed the license plate on the vehicle in front of me, “DRK SITH.” I guess he was a Star Wars fan. Then, I pulled up at the light going into my neighborhood where the vehicle was, again, in front of me. Then it pulled into the shopping center I was going into and the guy walked into the Safeway right in front of me. Perhaps I too am being called to the Dark Side.