Vision

Around when I hit 45, I suddenly needed glasses to read. I was prescribed glasses for astigmatism in primary school, but never felt like I needed them. In my 30s, when I was sleep deprived for an extended period, I'd reach for my glasses to help with reading books/laptop, but that was rare. Then in my mid 40s I realized it was tiring to read without my glasses. Then I went to the optomitrist and got new glasses. That was weird. I got mildly motion sick trying to walk with my new glasses at first. I got used to it. Now I can't read without glasses. If my running partner texts me to tell me he is late, I need Siri to read me the text. I really hate growing old. (The sore knees don't help.) After 5ish years of wearing glasses most of my waking hours, I tried contact lenses. To see again, without glasses! I understand why people do this. I still can't get them in/out in less than 5-10 minutes... but I've now worn them for 2 weekends. To be able to wear sunglasses! Just not having glasses and having to worry about my youngest grabbing them. I still don't think I could spend my day staring at a monitor with these contacts, but I'm enjoying being able to go sailing and not worry about loosing my glasses.

Rediscovering Techno

I have had a music addition since my teen years. In my late teens and early 20s, I measured the cost of everything relative to the cost of a new CD. (My discovery of CDs and their better sound relative to cassettes is another story.) I have long been a fan of pop dance music. Toward the end of high school I discovered Front 242, KMDM, Ministry, and the like. Then in college I discovered Techno. I was forever changed. I got into DJing with a friend and fell in love with techno. Not just electronica (although I still love a good pop electronica song), but detroit style, minimal, hard techno. Recently I have rediscovered my love for that sound. I forget how I stumbled across them, but I have a new addiction: dj mixes from Charlotte de Witte and Amelie Lens. They make me smile. I need more of that in my life.

Interesting times for networking

James Hamilton recently published an article about the increased pace in investment in networking. This very much aligns with my experience over the last 10 years and why I now work on Virtual Networking. 10 years ago, a data-center host typically had a single 1Gb link to the TOR (Top Of Rack switch/router), and the uplink from the rack was typically heavily oversubscribed, meaning that a rack of 30 hosts would only have 8Gb or 10Gb of uplink to the rest of the network. Now we see 10/25/40Gb uplinks per host and little or no oversubscription to the fabric. We are also seeing a massive upset in the networking industry. The ability of commodity hardware to do what used to require ASICs has lead to an explosion of flexible networking solutions. The utter dependence on Cisco / Juniper / et.al. is waining to be replaced by whiteboxes and moving the smarts to software defined overlays. As datacenter expansion has moved from owned/managed facilities to cloud we are also seeing these cloud vendors are big enough to justify home-grown networking equipment for more and more of their network. At the same time we are seeing the rise of technologies such as P4 which enables faster iteration and facilitates the entrance of new hardware vendors. These are fun times to be involved in networking. One of many reasons I work on Virtual Networking for Oracle Cloud infrastructure.

note to self: Raspbian Setup

This is mostly a note to myself to remind me how to setup a new raspbian image.

The initial setup has a number of challenges that this write-up addresses:

1. Locale and Keyboard as GB
2. Setting up WiFi
3. Setting up static IP
4. General Reminders

Locale and Keyboard

Update Locale to en.US UTF-8.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales
sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
sudo reboot

If keyboard is still not working, try manually editing /etc/default/keyboard and updating XKBLAYOUT to "us".

Wifi

Add to /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf:

network={
    ssid="myWifiSsid"
    psk="myWifiPassword"
}

Then restart network:

sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart

Other Wifi notes

Setting up Static IP.

Setting pi as Access Point

General reminders

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Robots

My significant other works in a bio research lab for the University of Washington. She sometimes uses a machine that she refers to as 'the robot'. I work at Amazon on AWS/S3. The closest thing I get to a robot is our soda dispensing machine. My office/desk needs a robot. hmmmm.....

Coffee shops

I'll admit that I live in Seattle, a city lucky enough to have weathered the recession better than most. And yet, Seattle is the home of Microsoft. As such, I would expect to see mostly Windows laptops when I wander into coffee shops. Historically, this has been true. There were always a few trendy folk (or well of dorks, such as myself) with some for of Apple laptop, but they were the exception. The tide has been trending toward more and more Apple products though. Today, I was struck as I walked into my neighborhood coffee shop and counted 5 laptops, with not a single Windows machine in the bunch. Soon, there-after one laptop user left and was replaced by the lone Windows laptop in the shop.

Has Microsoft mind-share fallen this badly? I know that when I talk with co-workers, many of them have Macs at home (or Linux... I do manage a team of software developers after all). This is despite the fact that many of them are ex-Microsoft employees. Many of us use Windows at the office, but it is telling that given the choice, more and more people choose Mac. I realize that Seattle is its own little microcosm, but I fear that this does not bode well for Microsoft. How long before the average person's only 'computer' is an iPad or Android type device?

We are moving to a world where everything is on the web. You don't need a large hard-drive because you can archive everything into the cloud, or maybe store everything on a computer that sits in your closet, or (more likely) next to your TV. Near ubiquitous internet connectivity fundamentally changes the game. Web applications for all your core tasks fundamentally changes the game.

Microsoft is just like the other dinosaur industries mentioned in Innovator's Dilemma. The pillars upon which their business depends are eroding. I fear that soon they will discover that they will wake up and discover that even their precious enterprise market is no longer safe.

Time to start think about selling my remaining MSFT stock.

Where did he go?

I have spent much of the weekend working on some browser-based tools to access S3 and manage content stored there. In talking to a few people about what I was working on, I often described it relative to a typical blog. Eventually that lead me to look at my own blog and realize that it has been over a year since I posted. Ouch.

So what have I been doing? Lots! Work (Amazon/S3) keeps me very busy. The last year has seen us continue to grow and launch feature after feature after feature. My team is hiring like crazy as well. This summer I spent 2 weeks in Maine with my family, trying to keep my nephew from riding off the roads into the bushes. I spent the spring climbing mountains taking the WAC's Basic Climbing Class. (Highly recommended by the way.) When not out hiking/climbing, my weekends are often occupied with walking/jogging the dog and generally enjoying Seattle.

I spent New Year's down in the SF Bay area visiting a friend, and talking to people down there made me realize how much I really love living in Seattle. It helps that so many of the tech people I talked to down there also use AWS. It is hard to imagine a better place to be.