*ugh* E-mail for mbarrick.net, mbarrick.com and gothic.bc.ca (and less-importantly, araneum.ca) has been down since the wee hours of Sunday morning. I didn't even notice until Sunday night because I got off to such a slow start yesterday. And it's not just ordinary 'just restart the service' down, but 'hosting company managed to have a catastrophic RAID failure that took out a whole bank of virtual servers' down / 'full restore over a slow connection' down.
If you have and older Mac that has a 64-bit processor but the 32-bit 1,1 or 2,1 EFI firmware (eg. a 2009 Mac Mini Core 2 Duo) and you want to install a recent 64-bit version of Linux on it, the 32-bit EFI firmware will leave you stuck at a prompt like this:
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1.
2.
3.
Select CD-ROM Boot Type :
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with an unresponsive keyboard and no way to proceed.
Think the idea of gesture-based computer interfaces is new? Prepare to be blown away... here is Spock using a gesture with the Enterprise computer in the **1964** pilot episode, "The Cage"... that's half a century ago!
For the purpose of this analogy I'm equating working on a corporate network with the task of plowing a field.
Windows - A tractor:
Does the job. Pretty much eveyone uses one. It breaks down from time to time, but because of it's ubiquity mechanics are easy to come by. Some tractors are better than others and every so often the manufacturer markets a real lemon. Fuel costs a fortune and the diesel you used to run your old tractor on is no good for your new gasoline-powered tractor so you are stuck with a useless tank of fuel behind the barn.
I just started a relatively short contract job today. It's pretty much on the level of the sort of work I was doing about 10 years ago, but these days underemployed beats unemployed, so I took the gig. And one day in I have to wonder how a lot of people occupying I.T. positions stay employed at all. I have a baseline criteria for evaluating a workplace: if my home network is technically superior, they fail.
"You know, when you have a program that does something really cool, and you wrote it from scratch, and it took a significant part of your life, you grow fond of it. When it's finished, it feels like some kind of amorphous sculpture that you've created. It has an abstract shape in your head that's completely independent of its actual purpose. Elegant, simple, beautiful.
