Mecworks

>>> UPDATE Oct. 28, 2005: Check out the new leaked D200 picures!

With all the anxiety building around Nikon’s supposed offering that would fill the gap in their “prosumer” line between the D70 and the higher-end cameras and in doing so, counter Canon’s 20D, there has been all together too much speculation and rumor-mill work. The most often talked about possibilities include sensor size and type, ranging from 8.2 MP which would be the minimum in creating an offering comparable to the 20D, to a 12+ MP sensor. Most people are hoping for a magnesium body rather than the polycarbonate D70 version. All this talk has inspired (ha!) several people to make some touched-up photos of the new Nikon D200! Imagine that. Well, it seems that every one of these photos so far has been shown to be a fraud, albeit most are well done. (more…) (673 words, 6 images)

Several years ago - maybe ten or so, I saw “The Point“. An animation about tolerance and acceptance of people who are different than the “norm”. Oblio, a small, personable boy is born with a round head in a land of pointed headed inhabitants. Being thrown out of their town, his dog Arrow is his companion as he searches to find a place where he is welcome. They find much more diversity outside his land than in, learing that he’s not different as much as the townspeople believe. (more…) (217 words, 1 image)

To handle the ever increasing ammount of projects that are not related directly to computers but are related to mechanical, electrical or similar enginerring dicipline, I have added a new catagory: “Mecworks R&D” which is filed under “Creative Expression” and currently has one sub catagory - “Shop Work”. The intent is to make a catagory underwhich several projects that I’ve done in the past as well as thoes to be completed or done in the future can be cataloged, diagramed, explaied, etc. Most of the photos for such articles will be found in the gallery. More detail than can be had in the gallery will be here, in the blog.

I came home yesterday to find that a power outtage in my neighborhood had lasted longer than my UPS. The previously recorded uptime for the I had was actually in this blog on the 11/16/2004. Now I don’t have the exact time the UPS failed but I can guess it was around 7:00pm, yesterday evening. So, my uptime would have read something like this:

7:00pm up 440 days, 2:42, 9 users, load average: 0.04, 0.01, 0.00

Uptimes are something a sysadmin takes as sacred. Its something to be guarded, protected and bragged about. So, I say “Goodbuy uptime of greater than 440 days. You will be missed”. Now there’s no reason not to do the hardware and software updates I’ve needed to do for the last several months.

When I posted the original word map of places I visited, I was wondering if there was a page that would let me do the same for states in the US. Thanks to Darren Davis who pointed me to the page I was looking for on the same server the other page was located. Go fivure - should have looked around a bit.

It would seem that I need to visit back east sometime soon. I’d like to but really haven’t had a chance to go. I have some friends who live in New York and my sister and her family live in Virginia so I now have some reasons to go. We’ll see when I can make it out. Just so you know what states are shown in the map: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

You can create your own map of the states you have visited here.

I saw this as I was poking around on the net and saw a few other blogs (mostly on PlanetN) which had a map that showed the areas of the world they had traveled. Well, here’s mine:

Click on the map to get a larger version. Since there’s no colors to differentiate the countries…what you see is USA, Canada, Mexico, Denmark, Sweeden, Germany, Spain and Japan.

I lived in Japan for a couple years as a missionary, then went back to live a couple times and once on business. While there, I lived in Hokuriku (Fukui and Takaoka), Aichi Ken (Ichinomia and Karia/Anjo), Tokyo (Kichijouji) and Kyoto (Yamashina Ku). I have been a guest speaker at the Tokyo Linux Users Group twice - what a cool group of people. Just proves that Linux rocks around the world! Japan is an amazing place. I really enjoy the culture and food. While I was there, I picked up the language and spent the next ten years or so putting myself through college as a Japanese speaking tour guide. I drove Japanese couples and large groups all over the SouthWest of North America and other cool palces including all the National Parks in Utah (Bryce Canyon, Canyonlands, Arches, Zion NP, etc.), Moab, Lake Powell, North into Yellowstone and the Tetons, Devils Tower, Custer State Park, and tons of other places. It was one of the most enjoyable times I’ve had.

Last summer, I took a trip to Europe for the first time ever and took a lot of pictures. Take some time and go through the various pages that have pictures of Spain, Denmark, Sweden and Germany if you want. It was awesome!

You can create your own visited countries map thanks to Douwe Osinga who currently works for Google.

I hope to do more traveling soon…

“…they found me, I don’t know how but they found me. Run for it, Marty.” - Dr. Emmett Brown, Back To The Future.

Well, hey, nice to be aggregated I guess… 8^) This makes it a total of two blogs that I know of that are now aggregating my feed (the other is UC Boyz). Actually, the aggregation happens by a cron job and the feeds are gathered from the ‘blog’ entry an employee can add to their personal pages in the company directory. You might want to check out PlanetN if you want to see what other employees of Novell, Ximian, and SuSE (which are all divisions of Novell) are up to. I see a few people on the blog that I recognize - Nat Friedman has an office a few doors down the hall from me - I’ve never seen him in it though. He’s always off at meetings. Luis Villa is working on the desktop stuff and has worked a little with the print team (where I spend most of my days) to help us get the Linux client download working correctly on NLD (default mime type actions with RPMs and RedCarpet used for downloading a client RPM). Miguel de Icaza was cool enough to present on Mono to a group of several area Linux Users Groups (in one such group I am a co-founder and serve on it’s board of trustees which is incredibly fun) at the last Brainshare in Salt Lake City. Jason Feilbach is the Novell IS&T guy who set up the aggregation and also takes care of several servers and services at Novell. There are several others as well.