Mark Turner

Back From Annapolis

Got back this evening from Annapolis. My flight left 90 minutes late, which meant that I could’ve driven home faster. I think I’ll try that next time, since its so much cheaper if I just take my own car.

The day went well, as did the trip. I’ve got a head full of ideas: what-if scenarios that I’d like to see how the product would handle. Very few times has one of these ideas proven to be impossible, which is one of the things that really excites me about the product. There are very few things it cannot do!
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SiCKO

I recently got a sneak peek at SiCKO [warning: self-playing Flash], Michael Moore’s new profile of the healthcare industry being released this weekend. Wow. If this doesn’t shame Americans into fixing our broken healthcare system, nothing will. It is very convincing, without pulling any punches. He lets people tell their stories.

Michael Moore may be the Upton Sinclair of our times: controversial mainly because he shines a light on problems we’d otherwise rather not think about. Love him or hate him, he makes you think. We could use a little more of that at a time when a bimbo like Paris Hilton is considered news.

MT.Net says check it out.

Surf Controlled

At a customer site today waiting for a database to update I decided to check up on my blog. Seems that SurfControl has flagged MT.Net in its “Blogs And Forums” list. Yay! I finally made someone’s list!

I’m in good company, as Jeff and Jamie made SurfControl’s list. The Hallie And Travis page, a blog running far longer than my own, didn’t make the cut. Well-known bloggers Chris O’Donnell and Doc Searls didn’t make the cut, either. With Doc’s hosted at a site named “weblogs.com,” one wonders what it takes to be flagged as a blog. Ironically, other websites I host on the very same machine as my blog are not blocked at all.

The process makes me think about those organizations who control the Internet floodgates, sometimes in secret. I had no idea I was on SurfControl’s radar until just now. What about Google filtering out search results at the whim of Chinese government bureaucrats? What if it happened here? If you get filtered by search engine (or a nanny proxy like Surfcontrol), you effectively disappear from the Internet, don’t you?

First Day Of Real Training

For the first time in a year I got to sit on the receiving side of a training session, this time for my new product, that open-source network management tool with the Zen-like name. Since the bulk of training came right after lunch (the crab melt at the Ram’s Head Tavern is teh bomb), I got a bit sleepy for a moment but soon rallied when the magic of the product became apparent.

Wow. Wow, wow, wow. This tool is amazing! Continue reading →

OpenVPN bliss

Since I’ve been on the road this week, I set up OpenVPN on my Ubuntu laptop to ease the process of connecting to home. Boy, why didn’t I do this sooner? It’s so nice to easily access all of my home machines without adding more SSH tunnels. The OpenVPN-protected connections are quicker to connect than the SSH tunnels, too.

Geeky stuff like this makes me feel like a Linux stud. Yeah, boyeeee!

New job

The new job is going well. I got here at noon yesterday and worked until 7. Didn’t get a lot of training due to other issues being addressed yesterday but learned a lot anyway. Should get a brain-full today with training all day long.

Annapolis seems nice from the little bit I’ve been outside. I especially enjoyed the sea breeze last evening. Its nice to be so close to the ocean. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to look around while I’m here.

General Assembly Moves To Limit Cable TV Competition

I cringed when I learned that Bellsouth would use the AT&T name. Though the new AT&T has little in common with the AT&T of old (aside from wanting to own the world), the name carries baggage for me. When I was in charge of phones at one former company, I was shocked to discover that AT&T had slammed my company – switching fourteen of our phone lines to their long distance service without our approval. I was so furious that I immediately filed a complaint with the N.C. Public Utilities Commission, after which an AT&T lawyer called to soothe my nerves. Had my employer not imploded days later (making the whole matter moot), I would have pressed the Commission to drop the hammer on AT&T. A similar case in Texas had recently cost a slamming telco $1.4 million. Seemed like a good starting point to me.
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