I had a BM

I was skeptical going into it. My friends in MA knew that I was not really into the idea. Going to Burning Man a week after moving back to Hawaii?  Wife moving from MA to VA, driving across the country to meet me in NV?  It sounds like a mad plan. The reason was to give us an experience that separates the New England chapter of our lives from the next chapter on back in the islands.


Burning Man is both amazing and disappointing. It's radical self reliance on Walmart at the last minute and Amazon if you planned ahead.  It's a place for rich white people to go and be rich and white.  Those that can afford a week's worth of resources, away from work to look at art and party are the 1% of the world.


Youth, drugs, sex, bacon and alcohol; in that order are what I saw most people going after. If you're not here to get drunk, laid, do drugs and party you need to figure out why you're here.

Some of the art was outstanding.  Art cars are largely awful.

I fixed a flat tire for a stranger in another camp as a gift, mostly to give something. They gifted me a CD of their own music. Living in a gift economy has made me realize that I prefer it over barter.

The playa dust sets the scene for a surreal landscape. Black Rock City is a prehistoric lake bed. The dust is in everything. It washes away the stink. It levels the playing field.

Or so I thought. I really wanted it to be a barrier. I wanted it to screen out the ones that didn't really want to attend.  I couldn't understand why so many people would go to just dance in the desert for a week!

I really enjoyed the sexy post apocalyptic dress code that it necessitated.

The first 2 or 3 days we were there I hardly ate anything. I hydrated very well but just was not hungry despite being incredibly active. Learning how few material goods I need to be happy was a really liberating experience. No internet, phones or screens for a week!

The most disappointing aspect was the music.  I wanted to not hear anything I would recognize.  I heard Kid Rock, Melissa Etheridge (on repeat), Limp Bizkit and Katy Perry & Carly Rae Jepson not ironically.

Quick highlights:  Thunder Dome, Lamp Lighters, reconnecting with wife, cinnamon roll.


I'm pretty sure my gift to the Playa next time I attend will be catering to the monogamous, vegetarian and sober crowd, the under served population.

And that's the story of my experience in Burning Man, Alabama.

Cylon tablets

25 minutes to enroll with Google Apps.

Conversations with Massachusetts Assholes

Question:

When is it OK to swerve into oncoming traffic?

Answer:




1. When the car in front of me is going slower than I want to go.
2. Fuck you, go Socks. HUEHUEHUEHUE
3. 

Everyone's an expert

Around 11:30 last night I let the dog out to pee before bed.  HB bolted out the door and off the porch, I heard snarling and I yelled for him to come back and he did. The damage was already done. He took a skunk shot in the mouth. He lay on the floor, spitting up a frothy mix of saliva and skunk, there was a bit of fur in there too.

The poor guy just didn't understand.  We ended up in the yard until 1am, alternating rubbing his face with spaghetti sauce and shampoo.  It was an enhanced interrogation as we held him down and sprayed a hose in his face to rinse off the skunk oil. We waterboarded our sweet, naive, stinky dog as he sat shivering, wet and cold in the yard in the middle of the night.

Today my hand smells a enough like a skunk that everyone asks about it. I tell them and everyone has a story.

Choosing a NAS

I want a NAS.  I want something rackable to fit in with my PE 1950. The 1950 has been sitting dormant for the last few months. It's kind of loud and I do'nt really have the time to get it up and running until I complete my CCNA.

Currently I have a machine running WHS v2.  I am pretty disappointed with it.  It's stopped doing PC backups nightly and I don't' really know where to begin troubleshooting it. WHS isn't 2008R2, so it lacks a lot of the features I really want to learn about, Hyper-V, DHCP, GPO, AD and DCpromo.  It has 3 x 1 TB drives, a quadcore with no VT  and a handful of DDR2 ram.  It's currently using the motherboard RAID controller for a RAID 5.

I want a NAS. I waffle between building and buying.  My budget is about $100.  My wants:

• Low power
• rackable
• SATA / SAS drives
• dual NICs
• Streamlined driver support

If I build, I can bring along a few drives from my WHSv2, memory and a CPU that is not low power. I have an Adaptec 2610SA RAID card, so I'd probably only need a case and an Atom.  If I build, then each piece is from a different vendor, with different support and warranty.  I'm kind of over building PCs from scratch.  I want centralized scalable management.

If I buy, I am quickly priced out of my budget.  Ideally I'd get a Dell, this would allow for centralized management through OMSA. Documentation, drivers and support are easily managed. It's probably not upgradeable.  

Another option, do I really need a NAS and server as separate devices?  Could I get a PE 2950, which supports 6 SATA drive, 32 GB of memory.  If I go that route I'd like to get a the Google Search Appliance build on the 2950, 'cause it looks silly. They go for ~$200 which is out of my price range right now.  It would mean only one device instead of two which limits the power draw and points of failure.  Part of this is to learn, and it's another thing to learn if they're on separate devices.

I wish Craigslist and eBay netted some amazing deals instead of what they have.

Managing iOS devices with MDM

I gave a talk on building a Mobile Device Management server for over-the-air enrollment.

Video

Outline

Slide show

The deployment, enrollment and management features are really based on your budget. If you only have $100 budget and a 10.7 Mac, Lion Server with Profile Manager is a fine choice, it bring the management in house which I always enjoy.  It gives you

1. Clear Passcode, 
2. Unlock
3. Wipe

It does not give full disk encryption, app delivery, or remote desktop. 

I think the best solution, although I have not tested it, is to use SCCM 2012 as it is cross platform, easily virtualized and can used Active Directory natively.  

I think the real challenge that can be easily overlooked is why to use the device at all.  Mobile phones, fine, you have data that should not be exposed.   Tablets in Higher Ed?  The challenge is how to integrate them into the classroom, how to make them useful tools. That's where the money and energy need to spent, researching the purpose. Managing the devices is the easy part.

Potato Soup

I starting using my crock pot more in recent weeks.  I now make potato soup.

• chop 3 or 4 potatoes, enough to fill to 2" below top of crock pot
• add 1 quart of broth 
• slow cook on low for no less than 6 hours, aim for 8
• 2 hours before you want to eat, add one chopped onion
• 2 hours before you want to eat, add 2 cloves chopped garlic
• 1 hour before you want to eat, add .5 lb cream cheese
• 30 minutes before you want to eat, add chopped broccoli
• 15 minutes before you want to eat, add .125 lbs of cheese
• serve with chives 
• serve with additional cheese.

Hierarchy of jokes

1. Make a joke about the person you're talking to, they laugh and don't realize it's at their expense
2. Make a joke and no one laughs. You only amused yourself.
3. Make a joke and everyone laughs.
4. Do not make a jokes, and everyone laughs.