Musings

General-purpose musings

There are 780 posts filed in Musings (this is page 60 of 78).

Au Revoir, Marcel Marceau

Pretend you’re a comic. Try to get a laugh without telling a raunchy joke.

Ok, try to get a laugh without telling a joke.

Now, try to get a laugh without saying anything at all. For over half a century the master French mime Marcel Marceau did exactly that. Monsieur Marceau passed away Saturday at the age of 84. For generations he defined what it is to be a mime. To be a mime you have to be quick at improvisation and also a keen observer of human behavior. No one did it better than Marcel Marceau.

And, no, there is no report on what his last words were.

Appreciating the parent blog

Kelly and I began documenting our lives as parents on the Hallie and Travis page weeks after we became parents. The site has grown, largely through Kelly’s posting, and has become a resource of sorts for other parents. Tonight another parent discovered the blog and posted a reply. Instant camaraderie!
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Reunions

One of the drawbacks of moving so often as a kid was leaving behind friends. Since my own 20-year high school reunion is approaching, I decided to look up the Class of 1987 from the other places I’ve lived.

I discovered a lot of old friends on the Class of 1987 websites of Spring Valley High School (Columbia, SC) and South Mecklenburg (Charlotte, NC). Even though I don’t have much in common with them anymore its good to know they’re still out there.

As for my own reunion, the Herndon High School Class of 1987 will be meeting again next month. Should be fun.

Anita Roddick

Just found out that Anita Roddick, founder of the Wake Forest-based, eco-friendly Body Shop store chain, died yesterday of a massive brain hemorrhage. Roddick, dubbed the “Queen of Green,” was a long-time eco-activist who also maintained a frank and entertaining blog.

A few connections to Roddick and The Body Shop: I applied for an IT job at The Body Shop a few months ago, one of her books was published by Kelly’s former publishing company (Charlesbridge), and my mom once interviewed with Roddick for a job as Roddick’s administrative assistant. My mom called it a memorable interview and I can see why!

Roddick was quite a woman.

Hurricane Fran, 11 years ago

I thought today’s date looked familiar. Today’s the anniversary of the morning after Hurricane Fran came ashore. For some like me, the night it came ashore and the following day blended together, as I didn’t get much sleep after a tree came to rest 3 feet away from my once-sleeping head.

(I blather about this every year, don’t I? A sign of geezerhood?)

There’s a weak storm churning off of Wilmington now which hopefully will bring rain to the parched state. Let’s hope it stays weak, but brings the rain.

Day four for the missing Steve Fossett

It’s day four for millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett, reported missing when he failed to return from a routine flight. His friend Sir Richard Branson calls Fossett “a tough old boot,” and its true Fossett has possibly more experience at cheating death than anybody. Still, with the search stretching on this long I’m starting to doubt that Fossett is alive.

If he is gone, the world will have lost a great aviator.

[Update]: Its actually day, four, not two. Even worse for Fossett, unfortunately.

Brief MT.Net Outage

There was a brief MT.Net outage yesterday when my Xen VM ran out of virtual memory. It seems the pre-built CentOS image I began using did not mount a swap partition, nor did I think to check it for one. Thirty seconds of sysadmin work later and the problem was solved.

So far I’m digging the service. Like I said previously, the days of the absolute need to run on bare hardware are now over. Funny how the early days of computing revolved around time-sharing and the promise of the PC was to free you from such sharing. We’ve almost come full circle, eh?

Virtualization and the death of KVM

I just got back from a client visit which lead to an interesting revelation. I went there to support the network management software that my company makes. Upon arriving at the client’s desk, I happened to notice a familiar KVM appliance sitting on his desk.
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