Dave's Blog

Friday, January 30, 2004 2:12 PM

Here's a story about new business formation in 2001 and 2002.  It 
seems that there are people who were laid off during this period 
who were able to start new businesses doing the same thing they were 
doing for others before they were laid off.  What this means to me 
is that the problem was not that there were not enough customers.  
The real problem was that the salespeople weren't finding them.  It 
was a crisis of attitude, not economics.  


Friday, January 30, 2004 1:50 PM

Who says you're powerless?  Here is the Superb Seven, a group of 
girls who have taken political activism to concrete manifestation.  
They are all age 14 to 15, which means they started their campaign 
when they were 11 to 12.  One of their fathers noted, "The experience 
is something they'll remember for the rest of their lives."  I have a 
feeling that it will have a lot more impact than that.  Look for these 
girls to have a major influence on the future of Sonoma County.  

Good news is good news.  I would like to see the press cover more 
items like this one.  


Tuesday, January 27, 2004 4:09 PM

I'm thinking of Mark Morford's frequent tirades.  He's right.  The 
Earth has bigger plans than who is warring against whom or which 
species we extinguish.  


Tuesday, January 27, 2004 8:27 AM

Perhaps that $85 billion for a gratuitous war is also pocket change.  
It seems the U.S. Congress can't keep a budget, as it is openly 
planning to run a one-half trillion dollar deficit this year! 
(See paragraph 8.)  Deficit:  That's one-half trillion dollars the 
Congress does not have to spend in the first place.  And you thought 
your credit card debt was high!  


Tuesday, January 27, 2004 8:29 AM

Yep, Gov. Schwarzenegger broke the campaign law.  As he said, "We 
won, get over it."  


Sunday, January 25, 2004 9:01:22 AM 

Drifting in and out of the Dream State, feeling a cycle of 
concsciousness, I am connected with the infinite cycles of this 
corner of the Universe.  Day, night, day, night.  Breakfast, lunch, 
dinner, sleep.  Breakfast, work, lunch, work, dinner, play, sleep.  
Simple cycles, complex cycles, patterns like the African drumbeats 
that weave a tapestry yet hold the rhythm so our legs know when to 
move as we cross the fire.  We celebrate Imbolc, not just this year, 
but every year, from the infinite yesterday through the infinite 
tomorrow.  One moment in time, standing in Mind forever.  Sitting in 
a car at Shoreline Park, watching Mercury high above the horizon 
before the Sun comes up, knowing that although the Solar System is 
vast, on the order of hundreds of millions of miles, the Sun is 
right there, and Mercury is right there, and the Solar System is 
this big.  Letting my consciousness expand to fill the Solar System 
with the obvious right-over-there, right-here existence.  

The horizon is filled with white light, the door of consciousness.  
Gray below, gray above, a line of white right across the center.  
At sunset the sky is filled with puffy clouds, blues and reds, 
vast beams of a glory marking where the Sun is hidden but spreading 
its loving rays across the sky.  I fall into the regular pattern in 
my wife's pyjamas, clouds and snowflakes, stars and planets, repeating 
endlessly, a microcosm reflecting the macrocosm.  

Imbolc.  Oimelg, the Feast of St. Brigid.  Motherhood.  A cycle that 
goes back as far as the differentiation of the sexes, male and 
female, in the vast memory of Time.  The dinosaurs knew male and 
female, hundreds of millions of years ago.  The Cycle of Life is 
manifest all around us, through us, in us.  The goodness, the 
loving kindness, the givingness of Life to all is printed in the very 
pattern of our existence.  Infinite bounty is a statement of fact.  
Infinite beauty is in our eye every moment.  Infinite knowledge is in 
our mind from birth to death, and beyond in both directions.  

Time and space.  Both reach out in all directions forever.  Many 
scientists feel that they are somehow the same thing, or parts of 
one thing.  Scientists of the Mind tell us that there is only One 
Thing.  All separation is illusion.  The atoms that reside in my body 
today have been neither created nor destroyed for eons.  Yet my body 
has no atom that was here seven years ago.  Everything is constantly 
being created and destroyed, it is the cycle of existence.  That 
includes us.  We are part of the Universe, we are the Universe.  


Wednesday, January 21, 2004 10:42:07 PM

Today I am studying Windows 2003 Server.  Why?  Because Life 
is Change, and I am going to keep growing with It.  Recently I 
read an article in the Microsoft Norcal Local News on using my 
Unix skills to understand Microsoft Windows more completely.  
I decided to take the course, so I priced it.  Microsoft must be 
very interested in getting my attention, because the price was 
right -- it was free.  

Back in 1995, when I was studying Novell Netware, an instructor 
told me he was moving to Microsoft.  He believed that Windows 95 
was going to drive Novell out of business.  For several years it 
looked as though it would, but the huge installed base of Novell 
customers keeps it alive to this day.  However, during the past 
three years I have noticed that customers are asking for a 
combination of skills, not just one specialty.  I won my last 
contract through my ability to describe how I learn quickly and 
how my experience was similar to, even though not exactly, what 
the customer needed.  

The market has led me to high-end service, using AIX, WebSphere, 
IBM HTTP Server, and so on.  Currently that means one platform, 
as you may have noticed: IBM.  But AIX is a Unix system, 
WebSphere is a container for Java applications, and IHS is really 
Apache in a Big Blue suit.  I am seeing a curious mix of 
proprietary and open source software evolving, and now it is my 
responsibility to know what kind of grass is on both sides of the 
fence.  

I interviewed at the nation's fourth-largest bank last year, and 
the lead developer asked me if I had actually built an e-commerce 
server end to end, i.e. from the HTTP server to the database 
engine.  Well, I had read all the books, worked with all the 
parts individually, and maintained end-to-end systems that others 
had built.  But I could not say that I had actually put a whole 
system together myself.  That is one of my current projects; I am 
building a LAMP system (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) on my laptop.  I 
knew how to do it intellectually before the project began, the 
devil is in the details.  Between this experience and reading 
Bruce Eckel's Thinking in Enterprise Java, I have a much greater 
understanding about what I see in a WebSphere application log.  

Unix is 34 years old.  Linux is 13 years old.  Windows is 11 
years old.  Will one of them drive the others out of business?  I 
doubt it.  What I need right now is to understand all three, so 
when I see a requisition for someone who knows Unix, Linux, and 
Windows, I can respond without any secret doubts to slow me down.  


Friday, January 16, 2004 9:26 AM

Here is something to admire George W. Bush for:  He can round up 
$2.3 million in one day!  (See paragraph 10.)  

Perhaps for someone who can scare up $85 billion for a gratuitous war, 
that is pocket change.  


Friday, January 16, 2004 8:41 AM

I saw an interesting ad this morning.  Starbucks is having a "Barista 
Career Fair!"  I didn't think of being a barista as having a career.  
Maybe I am thinking in the wrong league.  First branch manager, then 
who knows?  The sky is the limit!  

The fair is being held at 505 California Street, on January 23rd from 
1pm to 3pm.  Maybe this will attract people who can handle a lot of 
orders in a rush -- the fair is on 1/23 from 1 to 3.  


Tuesday, January 13, 2004 1:47 PM

We have maps of the Universe now:  
	http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~mjuric/universe/

It's kind of fun to look at one of these maps, drawn on a logarithmic 
scale to allow the possibility of representation without drawing it 
for miles and miles of featureless void.  What are those "great wall" 
thingies?  In which direction is the center?  


Thursday, January 08, 2004 9:41:58 PM 

	Iraqis Poised To Make Money As Mood Settles 
	USA Today - (BAGHDAD JAN. 08) 

	The capture of Saddam Hussein has given a boost to Iraq's 
	gloomy business climate, with some business owners predicting 
	a boom in investment. "Don't worry about the few explosions 
	you hear here and there," says Ahmed Fatah, 61, a wholesaler 
	of plastic products. "It is time to make money." 

Yes, Mr. Fatah, I like your attitude!  It is time for all of us to 
make money!

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