It's been a long time..I shouldn't have left you...
...without a strong rhyme to step to...
Ah a classic line from a great song of my youth - very appropriate in describing my blog output (kudos to the first person who correctly answers who the artist is and the title of the song). The crunch of Sun's Q4, responding to a brutal RFP and the follow-up that came shortly thereafter, and life with the family have taken up much of my time. I've had so many things on the plate that my blogging activities went down the tubes - and I'm not one of those folks who typically will blog a few lines here and there.
In any case in the near future I will be posting my detailed notes on installing Solaris Express build 20 on my Toshiba Tecra M2 laptop. I posted a few comments on OS News and as I've said there I encourage anyone who is new to Solaris and wants to get their feet wet should definitely start with the latest Solaris Express builds. As I mentioned before I installed build 14 which was the first release that incorporated the new boot architecture which includes GRUB and ACPI. I have IPSec VPN capabilities into Sun along with centrino WiFi (WEP security only for now unfortunately) and nVidia drivers which gives me a very nice setup to work with on a daily basis. Solaris 10 is a great OS but when your dealing with laptops and other interesting setups the new boot architecture with plug and play capabiites goes a long way to having a reasonable installation experience.
In lieu of my installation notes I encourage folks to review the hardare compatibility list on our Big Admin site which will help you determine if your system is a potentially receptive home for a Solaris installation. Also I'd recommend folks check out the high level feature comparison overview between Solaris 2.6 - 10 which shows the amazing improvements 10 has over previous releases - make sure you select "View All" to see all the goods. Once you do that check out these blog entries from Liane Praza and Bryan Cantrill that have pointers to blog entries from engineers on networking, drivers, security, and standards in Solaris 10. All very good stuff...
In other news I'm getting ready for my upcoming black belt test. I've been studying Tae Kwon Do for a little over 3 years now at Dynamic Duo Martial Arts & Fitness. I always said since middle school that I would study martial arts and get a black belt before my time was up. Of course I didn't think I'd be starting over 20 years later but better late than never. My only advice to those interested in the arts is to START NOW! Don't wait until you're semi-old like me to start. Once you lose your flexibility it's damn near impossible to get it back and when you have to do your kicks believe me you'll need all the flexibility you can get.
My test is supposed to last for 2 days and will cover everything I've learned since being a no-belt. For example it turns out the forms I've been learning are all part of one large performance which probably works out to 300 moves or so. I'll then be doing dozens of self-defenses, sparring combinations, and kicks. After that I'll have a brutal fitness regiment - I'll have to do 60 jumping jacks, 60 push up, 60 squat thrusts (the devil's work), 60 sit-ups, and 60 round house kicks on each leg without putting my foot down...all in under 10 minutes. Then last but not least I'll have five 3 minute rounds of sparring against 3 or 4 other high ranking students who will be rotated in every round - basically I'll fight a rested opponent every round. If I'm lucky I won't have to answer any questions that test my knowledge of miscellaneous facts about my school, association, organization, flags, etc. Unfortunately this will end the day before my birthday so I won't be able to enjoy it fully since I'll be in massive pain and dead tired (it took me 3 days to fully recover from my black belt candidate test earlier this year).
That's all for now. I'll try and get the notes up soon...
Posted at 12:00AM Aug 11, 2005 by curtaintime in General | Comments[2]
A mini-break from technology...
My web surfing tonight has gotten me to revisit a previous blog entry. Spin Magazine just came out with their top 100 album list from the last 20 years. They selected PE's 2nd album from 1988 "It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back" as number 2 on the list - quite an achievement given the competition over the last 17 years.
I found Spin's take on the "freshness" of the album interesting and deserving of a little commentary from the cheap seats.
Each album on the list finds a sweet spot between artistic brilliance, stylistic innovation, and cultural relevance. You could listen to the Smiths' The Queen Is Dead hiding under a pillow fort in your bedroom (as Morrissey would no doubt prefer), or it could blow your mind in a crowded bar. Why? Because it pushes a unique vision from the margins to the mainstream (or the margins of the mainstream), reshaping both. Until someone new (a Wu-Tang Clan or White Stripes) emerges to redraw the margins all over again. These records tell us something different with every listen; even at their tiniest, they make private epiphanies feel like public events.
This explains why we picked Radiohead's OK Computer as our No. 1 album over Nirvana's Nevermind and Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Between Thom Yorke's orange-alert worldview and the band's meld of epic guitar rock and electronic glitch, it not only forcast a decade of music but uncannily predicted our global culture of communal distress. Nevermind and Nation of Millions, while changing their moments irrevocably, seem less open-ended now, a little more "resolved."
Resolved? Maybe on the surface to the untrained or uncaring eye but peak under the covers and the issues mentioned on the album are still with us today. I won't dive into this complex problem here - one only has to look for 5 seconds to know things are far from resolved - but rest assured just looking at this one arena there isn't a large segment of black people in this industry (in leadership or as individual contributors) and it's an issue that has got to change for the better as we make our way through the 21st century.
In any case here's the top 10 from Spin's list:
- Radiohead - OK Computer
- Public Enemy - It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back
- Nirvana - Nevermind
- Pavement - Slanted And Enchanted
- The Smiths - The Queen Is Dead
- Pixies - Surfer Rosa
- De La Soul - 3 Feet High And Rising
- Prince - Sign O' The Times
- PJ Harvey - Rid Of Me
- NWA - Straight Outta Compton
Posted at 01:23AM Jun 21, 2005 by curtaintime in Music | Comments[0]
Still curious what would you do with 7.7 Billion Dollars?
I'm still very curious on what folks think Sun should be doing with its cash (which is now in the $4B range due to the pending StorageTek deal). Intelligent commentary welcomed...
Posted at 11:17PM Jun 12, 2005 by curtaintime in Advice for Sun | Comments[5]
What would you do with 7.7 Billion Dollars?
Given the beating we've taken from critics over the last few years it's no surprise our execs would always point to the $7+ billion in cash and marketable securities we had in the bank. Around the camp fire the conversation has always been "that's nice...what the hell are we going to do with it besides watch it sit and grow at 3%?" Of course there is no shortage of things we need to do to better position the company. The question at hand is what will give us the best bang for the buck?
If you've been following the news the last week you've probably heard that Sun is spending $50+ million on a new advertising campaign and announced we would buy StorageTek for $4.1 billion (really $3.1B when you consider they have about $1B in cash we'll inherit).
First off I'm 100% behind the advertising campaign (although I haven't reviewed it extensively yet to have an opinion if it puts forth the most optimal message). I'd even say we should spend more to make sure it's long running so we gain better mind share with our target audiences. People seem to have all sorts of knowledge about the problems or obstacles we've had but don't spend nearly enough time understanding all the good things we're bringing to the table. Of course as history shows us it would be a fool's game to wait for popular perception to change on its own - it's up to Sun to articulate it's vision, strategy, and offerings to anyone who will listen and do it every day.
I don't know how I feel about the StorageTek deal just yet. Let me state up front I'm not a storage guy and don't even play one on TV so I'm not the best person to judge this situation. I doubt the deal will will hurt us by any stretch - while Sun's acquisition record is spotty I'm fairly sure this will be a plus to our revenues over time. However I'm debating whether or not this deal is the best bang for the buck in the long haul. Spending a huge percentage of our $7.7B ain't something to take lightly and off the top of my head I'd would have picked 20 different things first before I got around to saying we need to buy a storage company.
That said while I mull over these events I'd like to ask folks to sincerely comment upon what you think we should be doing with our cash. I'm truly looking for constructive thoughts on where you would strategically place your bets if you were CEO. If you say something like "drop Sparc and go exclusively with AMD" I'd like to know how you plan on spending part of the cash to deal with the huge installed base, ISVs, and the fallout of such a move - there's no free lunch and the no gain without pain so please be mindful of that when you make your comments. I look forward to the conversation...
Posted at 01:32PM Jun 06, 2005 by curtaintime in Advice for Sun | Comments[8]
The Solaris Express Plunge: Nevada Style...Part 3
My adventures configuring Solaris Express on my Toshiba Tecra M2 continue with good results. As mentioned before I'm currently on build 14 which incorporates the newboot architecture that leverages a modified GRUB - what an improvement over the ancient DCA boot stuff we had before. Since we now use ACPICA all sorts of goodness is right around the corner like better power management. I modifed my splash screen a bit from the stock one we currently provide by adding the new Solaris logo to the lower right corner (you can click on the images to see the larger versions).
My Solaris setup boots pretty fast - I'd say after Grub gets out of the way it takes 25 to 30 secs for services to be available and another 10 seconds or so to get to my GDM login screen (by default we still enable dtlogin vs GDM).
I've got a nice commandline and GUI (Ginetmenu) writen by a Sun employee available to deal with networking which has been a bit of a pain to manage on laptops in the past (who wants to remember and type all the ifconfig options every time you switch networks). I have my Centrino wireless interface up and running using a beta driver developed by our counterparts in China. You can see interface iwi0 which corresponds to my Intel Pro wireless 220BG gear in the list of available interfaces.
From there I can easily setup a static IP, DHCP, DHCP w/NIS, etc. for a selected interface. You can the see the screenshots and the before and after ifconfig -a outputs.
Once I have the Cisco based VPN client or our IPSEC pilot solution up and running my need to boot into XP will go down dramatically.
Unfortunately most everything I mention above is not publicly available just yet but they should be soon in an upcoming Solaris Express release. What is publicly available is the new nVidia driver for Solaris 10 on x86/x64. While it officially supports only the Quadro series of cards it will work nicely with other nVidia gear like the GeForce based video in my laptop. I should have it installed over the next few days and will spin up Project Looking Glass if I have the time.
As far as a mobile user experience goes the setup isn't as seemless as using XP but I will have an environment that gives me nearly everything I need to function day to day. Of course the flip side is I will be able to do things I can't do anywhere else (zones, dtrace, SMF, mobile SunRay server, etc.) which is a great tradeoff. Build 16 became available yesterday and I'll probably install it late next week once I fully document everything I did to get build 14 to a nice state of affairs.
We've still got some work to do but as I mentioned before within a year a Solaris only laptop won't be so far fetched as it was in the past.
More to come...
Posted at 12:49PM Jun 04, 2005 by curtaintime in Solaris | Comments[3]
VHS vs. Betamax: What does Sun got to do with it?
I'm getting my thoughts together to start my advice to Sun column. The ideas are still not fully formed yet and I'm sure I'll ramble a bit but the theme of VHS vs. Betamax keeps coming up in my head. We all know basics of the classic market battle where the inferior quality format came out on top becauase it addressed the consumer's priorities better - for the most part people wanted choice and longer recording times more than they wanted better picture quality. While Sun is on the course of changing our DNA we still to a degree have a Field of Dreams mentality - build it and they will come. In some cases that's true but we need to put a little "VHS" into our repertoire.
My biggest critique of Sun over my 7 year tenure (and 7 as a customer before that) is that we have not poured enough resources/emphasis into making it easier for customers to take advantage of the gold we produce. An example of the DNA flaw was a discussion I had with an engineer 2 years ago at our customer engineering conference. He was talking about how you shouldn't use the newfs defaults when creating a file system for a variety of reasons (granted I'm not sure this is still the case). My immediate response was why isn't the generally agreed upon best file system creations options made the default? He agreed that it was a problem but for a lot of historical reasons it's hard to change stuff like this within Sun. It's things like this that burn me up - I can appreicate the complexities of making changes but when you out-of-the-box put people into suboptimal situations or are asking them to be Jedi apprentices to get in the game that's a long term recipe for disaster. I think a compromise would be adding an interactive mode to commands like this that asks simple questions and then builds a recommended commandline that gives the user a good out-of-the-box experience.
I got bit by the DNA flaw when installing the latest internal build of Solaris Express with the recently integrated new boot architecture. Obivously it's early in the game for the new bits but as I mentioned in my last post my advice is to comment things better in place where you force people to edit things by hand - comments don't cost a thing. Taking it to the next level I'd say it would be a great benefit to users if we interrogated the disks on the systems, asked a few simple questions of the user (will this be a mulitboot setup, etc), and build a usable menu.lst file (one that just doesn't boot Solaris only). It things like this that will go a long way to improve a customer's satisfaction.
My last bit of advice is for our Java Enterprise System stack. If I were in charge of setting priorities I would take the hit now and immediately cease all new feature development to focus the next update release on a truly unified admin console. We've did good job when we implemented a unified installer but the admin side needs work. I know it's a far more difficult problem to solve but I look at this like the old MS-Office vs individual apps battles of past. Most folks thought the individual apps offered by the competiton were probably better than their MS-Office peers (i.e. Quattro Pro vs Excel) but just like the VHS vs Betamax saga integration, cost, etc. won the day. Ease of use needs to be elevated to the same level as scalability, reliability, and availability.
Again I think our technology in many areas is best of breed but when you make it even marginally more difficult for customers (who are strapped for time like we all are) to take advantage of the goods you do yourself no favors in the long haul. And it's not like we don't have the skills to make this happen. We have tons of folks like Calum Benson so I know we can get the job done with the right mix of priority and resources.
Just my initial 2 cents on where Sun should spend some of our 7+ billion in cash and marketable securities...
Posted at 02:47AM May 14, 2005 by curtaintime in Advice for Sun | Comments[8]
The Solaris Express Plunge: Nevada Style...Part 2
First let me say self-inflicted last minute installs are a bitch. As mentioned in my last post I finally took care of enough pre-work to finally rebuild my laptop. While I mentioned the extra motivation to rebuild was the presentations being done at my customer what I didn't say was that my laptop was going to be used by our Communications Area VP and a Solaris Product Marketing manager. So beyond the fact that I wanted to have to latest and greatest bits rocking and rolling (my previous beta build 62 was ancient) it would really have been a personal defeat for me to have our folks talking about the virtues of Solaris while Windows XP was really driving the projector - not that there's anything wrong with that. That said I knew I was talking a risk starting an install at 1:00 AM of a new Solaris Express build that just incorporated the new boot architecture and slew of other goodies (sorry only available internally thus far).
First scare of the night was forgetting the new boot architecture in Solaris likes the BIOS to be PnP friendly like modern operating systems (thank god Solaris is finally getting up to snuff in some critical areas - more on that later). I've been scanning all the relevant internal mailing lists so I quickly recovered from that slip and the installation via DVD went smoothly (finally with DMA now set to on by default the installation speed is on par with our peers). I thought I would be in bed easily by 3 AM, catch 6 hrs of sleep, run to pick up some materials from a VAR partner for the event, head to martial arts class, and have my laptop all ready to go well before showtime. Boy was that wishful thinking...
The first problem was after the Solaris bits got installed and I rebooted. Solaris Express for x86/x64 now uses a modified GRUB as it's boot loader - our GRUB implementation understands UFS file systems so we can read a GRUB configuration file as well as kick start a kernel on a slice within a primary disk partition. Upon the reboot my laptop stalled at the grub prompt. Right away I knew something was wrong with my menu.lst configuration file so I booted from the DVD again into single user mode and mounted the partition to see what got installed. My menu.lst file had nothing but comments in it thus the stall since GRUB had no idea what to do. So I fired up vi, reviewed the comments, and put what I thought was the right configuration to boot either Solaris or XP. My first mistake was bringing too much from my previous menu.lst configuration (GRUB from JDS that managed a triple-boot setup). I added the following then rebooted:
title Solaris Nevada Build 14 root (hd0,2,0) kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot module /platform/i86pc/boot_archive title Windows XP root (hd0,0) makeactive chainloader +1
which got me in trouble. I first tried to boot into XP to make sure my existing setup didn't get trashed - I wanted to know immediately I didn't have a boat anchor on my hands. XP booted successfully and things looked sane so I rebooted so I could switch to my new Solaris install. Brick wall number 2: upon reboot no GRUB menu was presented - my laptop booted right into XP. For the life of me I couldn't figure out what the hell ws going on since my menu.lst configuration wasn't drastically different from my previous setup but unfortunately I'm not a Jedi in the ways of GRUB. After banging my head against the wall I gave up at 5:30 AM and hit the sack. Three hours later I went at it again. Fortunately you can count on Sun folks lurking on aliases 24 hrs a day and got got help from Casper Dik no less. I didn't need the makeactive command in my XP section of the menu.lst configuration. Thats makes sense but it's not clear to me why I was instructed have it in my preivous configuration which worked flawlessly but I'll investigate that another day.
So now I was back to rebooting and GRUB was back but it couldn't get Solaris booted. After more banging my head against the wall another Sun co-worker showed me the light. My GRUB root command in Solaris section of the menu.lst configuration was malformed but I say I was a victim of one of Sun's major DNA flaws (more on that later). The default menu.lst we install should be commented better. Everyone here in my office I show the current menu.lst comment to
root (hd<disk no>,<partition no>,x) --x = Solaris root slice
thinks something like this
root (hd0,1,0) * WRONG *
would be the correct GRUB command rather than this
root (hd0,1,a) * RIGHT *
Sun needs to do a better job making things more clear for first timers in this arena. IMHO Sun makes great stuff but we make it more difficult than our peers to get to the goods. All I know is that if I'm tripping on stuff like this I know paying customers are going to run into walls with far more negative reprecussions. Simply commenting the file better and adding examples for how other operating systems should be configured to boot would save a ton of headaches for customer and our support folks but Sun for some reason historically doesn't have a good history of doing this. As a result I'm starting a new category in my blog that is going to be dedicated to giving advice to Sun on how to better focus our resources to solve problems that we should have never had in the first place 
.
In the end the speed bumps were overcome, I got the materials from our VAR partner, broke the speed limit getting to my customer, and I got my laptop up to snuff 5 minutes before our folks started to present. And now you don't have to ask why my nickname is still "curtain time"...
Posted at 01:49PM May 13, 2005 by curtaintime in Solaris | Comments[0]
The Solaris Express Plunge: Nevada Style...
So tonight is the night. Yes I know it took longer than expected to get to this point but life is like that as I'm sure you all know. My need to upgrade is being driven by a series of Sun presentations to my customer this week. While I could get by with the current setup I've been delaying upgrading to the latest Solaris bits long enough.
As I mentioned before I have a company issued Toshiba Tecra M2 (1.7 GHz Pentium M, 1 GB Ram, and 80 GB HD) that currently has Solaris 10 Beta build 62, JDS 2 (linux), and XP. Given I need to minimize any potential downtime I'm doing the right thing by backing up my system. In the past I've used Partimage from the System Rescue CD but support for NTFS and USF file systems isn't fully baked yet. Partimage does have the nice feature of only dealing with the used blocks within a filesystem which can reduce the size of backups but the downside is that partimage must fully understand a filesystem. I didn't want to take too many chances this time around so fortunately I stumbled upon g4u which basically does a bit for bit copy of a disk or partition without regard to the underlying file systems. The handy feature of both of these tools is that they can pump the resulting image to a ftp server, NFS mount, or local partition.
Of course backing up a few partitions on a 80 GB disk means you need space somewhere to put the backup images. My current home workstation is a Sun Blade 100 (yes I'm taking donations to get myself a new Sun Java Workstation W2100z) that only had 2 15GB disks that were nearly full. Fortunately my co-worker gave me 2 80 GB disks so 2 weekends ago I swapped in the new disks and upgraded to Solaris 10. There's a lot of new things to get comfortable with (SMF in particular) but for the most part I'm getting used to the new digs but I could used more PC 133 ECC unbuffered/unregistered RAM to make things a bit more snappy.
So with that first dependency out of the way I used g4u to pump backup images to my now spacious SB100. Now if all hell breaks loose I can quickly restore my laptop to a usable state. The main reason I waited to rebuild my laptop is that I was eagerly awaiting for the new boot architecture to be integrated into Solaris. Unfortunately it won't be in the official Solaris 10 train until update 1 and I didn't want to wait that long. I finally decided to go with build 14 of Solaris Next (codename Nevada) - parts of which will find it's way into Solaris 10 updates. The way things look from the internal discussions on minor hiccups folks have had thus far I'd say a later build will be the one publicly available from the Solaris Express program. The new boot architecture includes GRUB so with the exception of wireless using my internal Centrino setup that was pretty much the last reason for me to keep Linux on my laptop. I'll have GRUB, nVidia drivers (sorry not publicly available yet but coming soon), Palm syncing, and virtual mouse/keyboard input support. I'd say in about 3 to 4 months I'll have just about everything I need to have a viable and stable setup.
So with that said hopefully you'll see me later this week in good spirits with a nice new laptop setup in hand...wish me luck...
Posted at 10:29PM May 09, 2005 by curtaintime in Solaris | Comments[1]
Rebuilding my Tecra M2 with Solaris and XP...
Here I am in the middle of my semi-vacation (of course co-workers are asking me for all sorts of stuff even though they know I'm off this week) and I'm thinking about finally getting around to rebuilding my laptop. Given the daily grind I just don't have the luxury of constantly refreshing my laptop. You figure if you want to do things right and back stuff up, etc. you're looking at a day to get a system to the state you want it in (patches, apps, VPN, etc.). You basically have to take a vacation to get a system to that happy place and probably even longer if it's a laptop.
I've got a company issued Toshiba Tecra M2 with a 1.7 GHz Pentium M, 14" 1400x1050 LCD, 80 GB disk, and 1 GB ram - a nice system for all sorts of uses. It comes with XP taking up the whole disk (NTFS) and the recovery CD will wipe the entire disk. When I first built the system I used qtparted to resize the NTFS partition down to 15GB, then patched XP, added the applications I need like StarOffice 7 update 4, then used partimage to build my own XP recovery CD. by doing this I wouldn't have to start from scratch doing rebuilds in the future and I'd have a XP image of a known state if all hell broke lose on that side of the fence as Windows has been known to do from time to time. I installed a beta build of Solaris (build 59) on my 2nd primary partition and Sun's Linux based JDS on the extended partition. The 4th primary partition is used as a shared Fat32 between all the operating systems.
Things worked fairly well but it's just a chore getting things to that happy state. I see folks all the time spending hours getting things up and running and I just can't bring myself to get on the never ending cycle of build, burn, and rebuild. As a result this time out I'm cutting out JDS Linux out of the equation (I'll throw it on another laptop I have for playground and demo purposes) to reduce some of the pain and going with a dual boot scenario of Solaris and XP.
Solaris has come a long way in the x86/x64 arena - ongoing optimizations has improved performance significantly and hardware compatibility has improved quite a bit. It's not up to par with Linux in several areas of drivers, etc. but I'm fairly sure within a year if you don't have too funky of a setup it will be a nice state of affairs. The Solaris Express based build I'm going to use has a new boot architecture that will do away with the only adequate installation/boot mechanisms we currently have on x86/x64. That combined with some forthcoming ACPI bits and wireless drivers the day I can viably go down to just Solaris on my laptop is soon on the horizon.
I'll post some notes about my build process as I make my way to that happy state. While many have gone down this path before it never hurts to have another documented spin on the matter.
Last but not least I mentioned I'd speak on the "matador" concept. On our account team we're famous for having all sorts of metaphore phrases to describe various situations. Being in field sales can very much be like being in a bull fight on a regular basis. Of course to survive the matador uses the red cape to gracefully evade the oncoming charge of the bull. The key word here is grace because you never want to go out like a sucker and look like your running frantically away from pending death. You want to evade and overcome the crazy or hard situations but do it in style. Folks walk away knowing they just gave you their best shot but you were "cool under pressure" and will be ready to fight another day. So if you ever hear one of use say "I just did a matador..." you know we just dodged a bullet with style
We'll discuss the powerful Jedi mind trick in a future post...
Posted at 01:20AM Apr 13, 2005 by curtaintime in Solaris | Comments[0]
One Last Thing Before I Hit the Sack...
I have to add a little "flavor" to the typical Sun blog mix. Of course everyone has to have the obligatory post about music so here is my short random thought. It doesn't pay to be unicultural and unlike many people I know I've always had a wide variety of musical tastes. My collection of music ranges from hip-hop to classic Rolling Stones to jazz.
That said, without question the two groups that have had the most influence on my life are Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions. Now for all of you who choose not to listen to hip hop they were some of the most influential groups in the genre during the late 80s and early 90s (Rolling Stone still has PE's 2nd album "It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back" as one of the top 50 albums of all time). Chuck D's and KRS-ONE's ability to talk about complex subjects and feed the minds of young African Americans was nothing short of a godsend for me during my formative years. They provided the background music for so many things my friends and I have tried to accomplish over the years to help improve the plight of our communities. In general they spoke to people's intellect and encouraged us to be about something. Back in the day I went to a PE concert at the Spectrum (do they even call it that now? I'm really dating myself now) in Philly - that was the show they made their first concert video from - and it was damn near a spiritual experience for me. I felt so connected to the crowd and the energy from the event made me think an army of us were going to make an impact on this world the very next day.
Unfortunately that style of hip hop isn't the dominant form played today. Today's music in many forms is does serious damage to those yound minds whose brains aren't developed enough to weed out the good from the bad. To quote another favorite group of mine, the Poor Righteous Teachers, has a line the captures the state of hip-hop today "never will I feed you poison and disguise it with a beat..." But that is exactly what many artists today do - with tracks that have you bouncing your head and tapping your feet your brain is processing verbal garbage and too many young folks unknowingly internalize many of the negative things that I'm sure impact their behavior. Will they act literally or directly on something said in a song? Probably not. But does what they hear and see in videos impact their value system? Given my observations over the years I'm damn sure of that...
Posted at 01:19AM Apr 12, 2005 by curtaintime in Music | Comments[1]
A Much Needed Break...
I'm taking a much needed break this week. Not a full vacation but a semi-vacation (I'll answer my cell and deal with e-mail) so I can focus on a few things around the house and other areas of my life. My wife and I adopted our son and daughter a year ago and I've had little down time since. I handle the evening shifts during the week (except Thursday nights when I have martial arts class) and take lead on the weekends. With the organization changes at Sun my workload has been crazy at a time I needed less stress to get a hang of this fatherhood thing. But as the saying goes "there's no rest for the weary..." so I've just dealt with situation as best I can. The kids have been a joy to have in our lives and few things make me happier than watching their faces light up when they smile which makes the daily grind have more purpose than ever.
In any case besides the first tidbit about me regarding martial arts (I'm a black belt candidate and should test for my 1st degree in a few months) let me speak about my nickname "Curtain Time". Anyone who knows me well knows I don't do things before they need to be done. I'm not one of those people who believe in hurrying up to wait. I'm all about just in time delivery which works well for me 99% of the time but can drive others a bit crazy. The myth started when my co-workers and I had to deliver a series of presentations to our customer Lucent. Folks kept asking me about specifics on my presentation well in advance of our meeting and I gave them only general overviews of what I'd be doing since I hadn't put my slides together yet. During one conversation I said don't worry about my part because "...when the curtain goes up I'll be ready" - thus the nickname was set in stone and I've tried to uphold the legend ever since...
I'll speak on a technical topic and discuss the "Matador" concept the next time out. Until the next time...
Posted at 11:56PM Apr 11, 2005 by curtaintime in General | Comments[0]
Welcome to the Terror Dome...
Hi Everyone, Welcome to the Terror Dome - my standard catch phrase for new situations in life (quoting the great Chuck D of Public Enemy). I'll be musing about many things of interest: Sun, movies, commentary on the news, music, etc. Hopefully my spin will be more on the unique side given my background (more on that later) so hopefully everyone will enjoy the ride.
Posted at 02:15PM Apr 08, 2005 by curtaintime in General | Comments[1]
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