Random thoughts, observations, and comments. I'm not creative, so deal with it.
Phillip Wagstrom's WeblogApple's out with its new G5 iMac.
This is a thing of beauty. Nice, compact, and it has everything included too (USB, FireWire, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc.) After getting my wife a nice 15" PowerBook this past fall, it makes me wonder why anyone would ever buy a PC anymore.
So I'm in a bit of a dealima here. Do I get me a nice Mac? Or a nice Opteron-based W2100z? Sooo many choices.
It seems that the IOC (International Olympic Committee) had banned blogging and posting of pictures or video by the atheletes until after the games concluded. Seems they did this in an effort to protect the broadcasting rights.
I wonder what they're going to be doing for the next games in which people will likely be able to stream pictures and video directly from the venue using their cell phones! You can't really go about and ban cell phones, can you?
Considering that the broadcasting was pretty much terrible, IMHO, this is really annoying. They'll talk about a Gold Medal match and "take us there" (As if it was going on right now, but in the States its delayed by at least 8 hours). Then they show the match starting at least halfway through the match.
Come on, I watch football that way, not the Olympics. Give me the full match, without the commentary.
I also have to agree with my wife on this. Quit showing ONLY the US competitors and sports that the US dominates. My wife is from the Czech Republic and likes to see how they do occasionally. I like to see the rest of the world compete too!
So why the politics category? Well, its a policy made by someone in authority so it sounded like a good place to put it.
So I got back from my 2 weeks of vacation on Monday. It almost felt like I needed (and still need) another vacation to recooperate from that one.
So to start things out, I spent the first weekend (August 9th) pouring concrete. I'm building a deck and had to pour the foundations. I had 80 bags of concrete from Menards at 60 lbs each. Not a huge amount, but quite a bit anyways. I'm just glad that I rented the 6 cubic foot cement mixer instead of the 1 cubic foot one like Dad said to get.
Monday, my wife and I headed out on a camping trip up to the UP of Michigan. (Had to let the concrete set!) We did 2 days up at Porcupine Mountains. We had a very nice campsite (Number 11) which is right next to Lake Superior. It was excellent. We took a hike for about an hour or so when we got there on Monday evening.
About the time that I lit the campfire to do the traditional hot dog roasting and sacrificing of marshmallows to the camping gods, it decided to rain. I rained for the next two days!
Even though it was raining, it didn't make sense to just stay in the camper all of the time. So we took hikes out to Mirror Lake, the Union Mine Trail and saw the waterfalls on the Preque Isle River as well as the Lake of the Clouds. We got a bit wet, but that's OK. As we had the tent trailer we could always come back to a nice warm and dry camper after the hikes. I still feel sorry for the campers that were in tents.
So from there, we drove up to Copper Harbor and to Fort Wilkins State Park up at the very tip of the Keewenaw Penninsula. This time the sun came out so it was beautiful up there.
Wilkins doesn't have nearly as many trails to follow in the park, but there are ones around the area. We took walks out to Hunter's Point. This was quite exciting for our dog (A year old black lab mix) as he'd never really been to a lake. We found out quickly that he's like every other lab that I've seen and proceeded to spend the time "rescuing" large rocks from the lake.
We also took a hike around Estevant Pines. Its a privately financed nature preserve that's open to the public. Its an old growth pine forest. Quite nice.
We only camped for 4 days total, so Friday was the drive back home. Then it was time to start on the deck.
All I can say about the deck is that I know now what mistakes to avoid next time I build one. We had fun with Beams that were set an inch off (so one side had an inch too long outside the joist and the other an inch too short) as well as anchors set in the concrete that weren't quite in the right places.
In any case, its mostly up. Though it proved to be a cooler week here in MN that normal (maybe 70 for highs), it was perfect weather to do deck work. I could be out in the bright sun without roasting in the heat. I even somehow managed to avoid getting too bad of a sunburn.
Let's also say that I didn't have any problems sleeping during the week.
I never did get to clean out the garage...
So now I'm back at work and in need of another vacation. I started the week to 2700 email messages. (Most of them are email discussion aliases, but its still 300 that I had to read directly.)
Ah... Its Friday.
I'm on vacation for the next two weeks!
My list of things to do:
In our weekly district meeting this morning, (It was donut Monday, so I had to attend. I'm not technically part of the district team, but I go anyways.), we had the regional sales director sit in our service meeting to talk about what's going on with the sales force and what the message is going forward. I had heard a chunk of the pitch before the end of the fiscal year, but this was for the rest of the district team.
Sounds like some things that have been broken for a while may actually change. Or at least there is now the understanding that these things are broken. A good sized chunk of them were things that we let customers do to themselves.
Lets take for instance brokered parts (aka. gray-market parts). We've got a few customers that will go and buy parts and system boards from brokers for their equipment. In some cases, these parts will go into the big boxes like SF15k's or E10k's. The policy used to be that if it ran fine for 90 days that we'd bring it under a support contract.
The big problem here is that we don't know the history of these parts. These boards could have come from a lease return, or from a competitive trade in. I think that I've even seen some that were scrapped by our logistics. (Which is why we sometimes refer to these boards as coming from "Al's Junkyard"). I know of one case in which a customer ordered some E10k boards and they came in a box, without ESD protection, stacked 3 to a box. After 3 months, we'd act like there was nothing wrong with the boards and happily replace them if they died after that.
This would be like deciding that you wanted the updated transmission or a turbo charger on your new Audi and instead of going to the dealer to get it, you go to the scrap yard and get one. Then when it breaks, you're expecting the dealer to repair it under your new car warranty! Not a good business thing for the dealer to do so.
The big thing that stuck into my head was this. Sun is the only major computer manufacturer with no consumer business. You can go to Best Buy or Wal-Mart and buy computers or products from IBM, Hewlitt-Packard, or Dell. Does Sun have a presence there? Outside of StarOffice in a few places and some Java Desktop Systems on Walmart.com there isn't any consumer presence.
Need to work on that.