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My friend Conan died at the corner of poverty and for-profit healthcare. Now is the time to support single-payer.
Californians: back Healthy California. US Citizens: back Medicare for All. UK Citizens: support the NHS. My friend Conan Soranno died on 24 August. He was 39 years old, a gifted photographer, technologist, motorcycle aficionado, and self-described ‘mad scientist’. He was brave and strong and smart. He died two days after being forced to choose between…
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Memories of San Francisco
The early Summer Sun is flashes on City Hall’s golden dome — a beacon for the West — as I step inside, moving along the long marble staircase, in the heart of our secular Vatican where we paid $75 to be married all those years ago. I pause next to the statue of Harvey Milk.…
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What just happened? Lessons from a ‘free’ Iraq. or: Just what do you think we did, anyway?
After seven years of constipation, Sir John Chilcot finally released his report into the Iraq war1. We have officially been told what a lot of people expected all along: the Iraq war wasn’t necessary, was probably illegal, definitely poorly planned, had no post-war plan, and did not achieve the goal of a stable democratic Iraq.…
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HP C7000 Bladecenter: awesome new test lab in one unit!
Last year I picked up a surplus HP C7000 Bladecenter (generation 1, complete with BL460c and BL480c G1 blades, fibre channel, Cisco switches, etc) to run Openstack test loads. At about 150 KG, I paid just under £3 per KG, which is pretty damn good for a self-contained test lab (near scrap metal prices, actually).…
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Little Mouse
Little mouse A hundred years of evolution have made you the colour of the platform. Does it help you see the point of the Tube? Sometimes, you see, I have doubts. ****** I found this poem stuck into the pages of a book I left at the pub’s new lending library. Good thing I checked,…
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Pi-Top First Impressions
So, my Pi-Top arrived last week. Today I took everything out and put it together. Here are some initial observations: Slick packaging, well thought-out, and very professional. It looks like a real product the minute you open the box. This is a cool educational device that will help kids tinker, but it is definitely a…
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The Continuing Adventures of a Newly-Minted Literary Snob (AKA Writing is Hard)
I was out for a concert yesterday with a friend. He’s working up to self-publishing a book, and I’m excited for him. But I think that didn’t come through in the conversation, because I’m (apparently) a literary snob. You could see how that might mask my excitement. Trying to be a fairly open-minded fellow, I…
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The Fishmonger of Pike Street Overpass
It’s an unseasonably hot afternoon in Seattle. She’s leaning on the railing of the Pike Street overpass, psychedelic gypsy skirt, black tank top, Audrey Hepburn sunglasses. Her hair is a long, brunette ponytail. She has a partially-completed tattoo sleeve on her left shoulder. It was started a long time ago. The cars stream down the…
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Moving to the public cloud? Yes, you still need operations staff.
A quick note, following from news of Google Compute outage yesterday, and outages caused by DNS changes at Amazon S3 slightly more than a week ago, it’s important to remember that moving to the cloud still requires operations (sysadmin, devops, whatever we want to call it). There is a belief that moving to the public…
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Why Privacy Matters, A Real-World Example
Earlier this month, someone I went to school with a long time ago was arrested and charged with some fairly serious crimes. I wouldn’t call him a friend in pre-social media terms, but we knew each other a long time ago, and that’s good enough in the era of Facebook. Which is telling. I found…