Christmas preparations

Got the house lights up without anyone falling off of the roof. always a plus. I'll post a picture if I can...going to be pretty dark we are not Domino Farms..just doing our little bit to cheer up the neighbourhood. Not many people with light this year. This is one way to gauge the local economy. Up here in N. Michigan it's probably waymore than 7.7 % unemployment. probably anywhere from 15-25%. I was reading in the local rag (Oscoda Press if you're interested) about a HS student, Patrick Maher who is trying to collect 1,000 peanut butter jars for poor students and their families. It also mention that 80% of the HS students are eligible for free or reduced cost lunches. Not a good statistic. But the GOP wants to cut these 'moochers'... argh... Coming as I do from the 'Welfare State' of the UK in the 60s with the Labor government with free health care and a national insurance and pension scheme, subsidized college education (free if you are poor but a good/smart student), it strange to listen to people complain about 'European Socialism' and 'Obama is a Socialist/Marxist' over here. They have no idea what they are talking about. I LOVE America and I love the country and it's institutions be we need to go back a little to the 'socialism' of FDR. If you don't care about your citizens, young, old, sick, poor you are not a civilized country, let alone a super power. IMHO...

School's Out , er BACK for the Fall.

School started. This year's my youngest's senior HS year. I'm in school myself, kind of. Taking a 'Suse Academy' class in work. 15 weeks of 6 hours+ a week to become a certified SUSE Linux SA and Professional. Spent the Summer taking my vacation for once while the weather was good, even went to the beach a couple of days. Not a lot else to talk about

We're having a heat wave! a tropical heat wave...

yeah, you know like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers... :) Nice weather. hight 80s/low 90s all week and dry. maybe too dry, the grass is dead. Weeds seems to be doing fine, thanks to the neighbour's cultivation of them. badda boom... So where is the summer going? RHEL class was good. A little too simple, maybe, but I still learned a lot and got to practice. I work from home, a long way from the nearest test center, so I don't know how I'm going to take the certification test. No sign of my son's PS3, so no movement on installing YDL (Yellow Dog Linux) on that. He's working at Kmart for the summer to get money to pay for car insurance. He wants to quite. He's lucky to have a job in this economy. "Youth is wasted on the wrong people!" (It's a Wonderful Life).. As for the Linux desktop... minor progress. I installed Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) on a third partition, so now I have RHEL 6.3, Debian 'Squeeze' and Ubuntu "PP" to play with. Trying to connect them to the work network(s) (yes more than one VPN required.. :( is a GIANT PAIN... Supposedly, there are THOUSANDS of people out there using this stuff, but I don't see it. Depots are missing stuff, there are typos in scripts, instructions are wrong. VPNs don't work... arghhhh... This is my 'special talent', I conclude. Anywhere there is non working crap, I intuitively zero in on... It's scary.. Well, vacation runs out on Monday. I still have unbooked time off. Think I'll schedule another week in August. I have another class in SLES (SUSE Linux) coming up in September. It's a 6 hours a week for 5-6 months class.. Should be fun. same issues with testing however..

Summer's finally here

After a warm late winter, cold later spring, Summer's finally in with a bang in Michigan. The Chihuahua, Bella suffers from the heat - too funny, give she lived in Texas. a reasonable week turns into a drag of a weekend. Some idiot thought is would be O.K. to do some h/w on the SAN during the day Friday - yeah....then they thought 'Well, the oncall can just spend all night Friday and Saturday validating stuff. We don't have to socialize any plans or timelines - their (body part) is ours'... Luckily, not my company that screwed up - so the beatings will be on the client side. But they never learn. 'Plan' is a 4 letter word with them,or maybe not even in their 'newspeak' dictionary.... Thanks for that George! :) I've lost a lot of weight. Helps with the arthritis. Well, that's enough for now. Got RHEL training later this month and my 'summer project'(s) is to put YDL on my son's PS3 and find a decent VPN solution for my RHEL laptop to connect to my company and client's networks.. toodle pip

Autumn again

Hardly seems like a week since the Spring started... Oh well, that's Michigan
for you.
House is now full. My daughter, Megan is back here from Texas/Georgia to take
some classes and try to get her life going.
My 'Eldest', Bryn is still in Georgia. She's going through some trauma.
I wish she'd call me . Maybe I could help. That's kids as well.

The Big One

Thoughts on turning 60 last Monday. Hey , it could be worse. I could still be 17 years old and pining to the love of a girl I was too shy to talk to. I met her years later, broke the ice and found out she was engaged. {sigh} Those who talk about grabbing the brass ring are right - every time. God, and Fortune (the luck one, not the $$ one) always favour the bold But it didn't turn out so bad. I might never have come to the US and met my wife and had the family I have. As Steve McQueen in the Magnificant Seven related in the story about the guy falling off the side of a skyscraper "so far so good...."

This is a picture I took back in 1964? on my first trip abroad to Spain, At that time Franco was still in power, but the British tourist trade was starting big time. My mother and I took a trip to the valley of the Algarve, or something like that, near Alicante. We took a bus for a few hours and then we had to ride donkeys over a steep hilside into this beautiful valley filled with water and exotic fruit. I took a picture of one of the donkey guides and his wife sheltering from the heat in the shade of a tree. No skill, but I'm quite proud of this