johan's Journal

I'm setting up a new blog using Wordpress, as installed on my Dreamhosted site: http://www.giantfoo.org/wordpress/.

About an hour ago, i turned off the last three NetBSD machines i was running at home: lakshmi, brahma, and vishnu. ("HCC" stands for "Hindu Computing Cluser.") I'm writing this on mimir, the Mac mini desktop and entertainment machine. Other than the Linux appliances (Netgear (nee Infrant) file server, and the Logitech (nee SlimDevices) Squeezeboxen) i don't have any other Unix-like computers running in my house. (Well, at least that i'm aware of... oh... crap. I guess my G1 phone counts too. But you get the idea.) It feels a little weird. It's definitely quieter.

While i've been working on this for some time, it still saddens me. The monetary cost (and to a lesser extent time cost) of running this many Internet-connected servers at home had just gotten too high. It's not so much the electricity (though the Alphas do pull some amps), but rather the Internet connection. I'm paying $160/month for 12 usable IPs, 8 Mbps down and 768Kbps up. Compare that with Dreamhost's $9/month for unlimited domains*, unlimited email accounts, and unlimited bandwidth and disk quotas.

I'm sure in the weeks or months to come, it's going to feel good to be free of the responsibilites of hosting my and other peoples' data, and all that entails. It will enable me to run away and see the world without worrying that back at home, in my closet, a computer's hard disk has failed and it needs me to fix it, or the cable modem has fallen of the Internet and needs to be power-cycled.

But right now (ironically) it just feels weird to be... more "normal." I'd been hosting my Internet content on lakshmi for about eight years. The Compaq (Alpha) DS10s, lakshmi and sarasvati were good servers, and NetBSD was a good operating system for them.

* additional domain registrations after the first one is $10/domain/year, but there's no additional charge for hosting more domains.

I guess for Steve Jobs, it was back to Apple. And that seems to have been very good for Apple so far, and i guess for Jobs, too. However, as Ming-Dao Deng says in 365 Tao "Never jump out of the same hole twice."

I took just about all of my NeXT Computer equipment to Goodwill tonight: two turboslabs, a couple of 17 in. monitors (that didn't seem to be working), three printers, and two keyboard-mice-speakerbox sets. That was definitely one of my favorite keyboards of all time. And the computers and OS were pretty awesome, too.

I started acquiring NeXTs around 1997, the first from a financial company dumping some in Chicago. They had been popular platforms in finance, because of their comparatively amazing development environment, and because finance was one of the few markets that could afford them.

They also made in-roads into research and higher-ed, where i got to work with them. Tim Berners-Lee did a lot of the early development of the WWW on NeXTs at CERN. NeXTs ran the worlds first web browser, too.

I lusted after them mightily, but could not afford the many thousands of dollars for them new, back in the day. But i got my chance about 10 years later. I spent many, many hours, perfecting cerridwen and oghma in my homes in Chicago, Maryland, and Austin, and i enjoyed the awesome 400-dpi, full Postscript laser printers, and display Postscript. The ran NeXTSTEP 3.3, (patched), as well as every piece of useful software i could get my hands on. And it was sweet -- those were some good times. It was very satisfying to have setup a "perfect" system, but ironically, it's only really possible when that system's environment is dead, because otherwise, it's still being improved, and the sysadmin must keep making changes.

But oghma had been powered off for many years, and cerridwen for nearly two, so a few days ago, i decided with a trans-Atlantic move looking likely, it's time for me to unload everything i don't "need." This has been brewing for many years... i've often thought i should just get rid of all of the things that take up so much of... of what? Of my time? Well sort of, but not really. Of my space? Well yes, i guess so. Of my mind? Yes, definitely.

When i left Austin in November of 1995, my rental truck was laughably empty, and i could tell you exactly where everything i owned was. ("My high school ring? It's wrapped up in a scarp of an old t-shirt, inside of a boysenberry-flavored yogurt container, in that box, right over there. The one that says "QEP" on it. That stands for "Quality Electronic Parts.") But over the past 10 years i've realized i'm just drowning in all of this stuff. Most of it is useful, functional, entertaining, or a sentimental attachment, but there's gotten to be so much of it, too often, i cannot even find this useful or desirable thing that i think i have somewhere.

For whatever (presumably irrational) reason, the road calls to me, and it says only to bring what i can carry. (And that i should most definitely not be driving a Very Large Truck to "carry" 20,000 lbs of stuff.)

This is obviously a period of much change, just after what seems to have been now a long period of sameness, and just before a very different future. Yesterday night, as i was trying not to kill myself while carrying NeXT printers and computers down the rickety fold-up ladder from the attic, i was thinking about how heavy all of this computer equipment has gotten. "Maybe i'm getting old," i thought, "I used to sling heavy monitors and computers around most days of the week for a living."

And i realized this is the metaphor -- or maybe it's not even that, maybe it's the literal condition my life has been in for the last 20 years: I've been sysadmining all that time, and i've enjoyed it, but it seems as if it's time to spend more time not managing these little boxes of flowing bits of electricity.

At least when i'm at home.

But i overslept. I told M. i'd meet her in the lobby of the hotel at 10am. About 10:05 i woke because a strange electronic device was making "doot doot" noises. My vocation for the past 20 years has been to take care of electronic devices that make these noises when they are sick, so i'm highly sensitized to any sort of electronic bleeping or blooping. I opened my eyes. "Hmm..." i thought, "this appears to be a hotel room complete with a phone that wants some immediate attention." As i picked up the phone, i looked out the window and saw grey. About 50m away from wherever i was, a large, also grey building. I could tell that i was very high above the ground.

"Aruh?" i said into the phone.

"Hi!" said M.

Ah, yes, that's M., we're in Poland, where i am visiting, and i was supposed to already be downstairs in the lobby of the hotel... 6 minutes ago, ready to go do and see stuff. Crap.

A short while later M. and i headed out towards her flat for some brunch. We stopped by a market and she bought few things. It was one of those older-style markets you don't see much now in the U.S. -- a covered building with long and wide hallways, stalls lining both sides. They seemed to sell everything. M. bought a few foodstuffs, and we left.

Outside the market is a small snow-covered park, full of various corvids and Mallard ducks. In the sidewalk at my feet, i see a marker of the Jewish Ghetto's wall from the war. I stopped and look at it for a moment. We walk for a few minutes, and the we come to a small memorial that shows the area of the Ghetto in a sort-of sculpture, laid on top of a relief map of Warsaw.

I started to feel a little odd. It's about 11:30am, and i haven't had any coffee yet today, and i'm having difficulty processing this. I was a History major in college, and know more about the history of the Second World War than probably any other period of time from before i was born. I'd been to Europe many times before, and seen a few remnants of the war in Germany and the Netherlands. But this was powerful and sobering. In 1986, i recall that i saw the Anne Frank museum in Amsterdam, but that was quite some time ago, and it was somehow different. Maybe because it's a museum you chose to go to, as opposed to this small, non-descript memorial to the enormous pain and suffering for hundreds of thousands of people.

I started thinking and remembering what i knew. 70 years and a few months before i came to be standing at this spot, the Germans invaded Poland. France and Great Britain betrayed and abandoned Poland, failing to fulfill mutual defense treaties and other promises. A week or two later, the Soviet Union invaded from the East. Germany and the USSR had a peace treaty then, so they just divided up Poland. Of course the Poles fought for the survival of their nation, but up against two of the largest and most technologically-advanced armies of the day, they never had a chance.

A year after the invasion, right where i was standing, the walls went up, and the Jews in Warsaw were separated and confined within the Ghetto. And then, over the next few years, the Germans shrunk the ghetto and its population until there was nothing left. They became some of the millions and millions of people murdered, or starved and worked to death.

It's a lot to take in, especially pre-coffee. We were on our way to M's flat for brunch, so i pulled myself away from the small memorial and we trudged through the snow.

M's flat was very warm (warmer than my house in Austin) -- radiator heat, like i had in Chicago. I ate a lot of yummy sandwiches constructed of various homemade ingredients (like homemade mayonnaise, jam, or peanut butter), and i may have taken a nap. (Apparently all the sleep the night before wasn't enough... or maybe it was all the food and the warmth of the flat compared with the cold greyness of outside.)

Early in the evening, M. took me to see Old Town. I took some pictures but it was dark, this being the middle of January at around 52 degrees North latitude.

In Old Town we saw cool sites like Zygmunt's Column (those streaks behind it are sea birds flying by during the photo exposure) and the Market place .

All of Old Town was rebuilt after the war because the Germans destroyed it: first by the terror bombing and bombardment of Warsaw during the initial invasion in Sept of 1939, and then they completed the destruction, five years later in August 1944, in response to the Warsaw Uprising. Old Town was rebuilt after the war, in its various period styles. It is very strange to look at something that appears to be from the 13th or 15th century, but you know was meticulously pieced back together in the past 50 or even just 20 years.

It was the middle of January, but some Christmas lights and decoractions were still up, and even though it was cold and dark at 6pm, there were plenty of people out. Some of them were sledding down a big hill into a park near the Vistula River.

We walked back along the Royal Route and such a bunch of other cool stuff, like the Presidential Palace and a statue of Copernicus in front of the Royal Academy of Science

January 15th.

Here i am again in Frankfurt. This airport is starting to become familiar. The little kiosks with overpriced snacks are scattered along the middle of this terminal. The Italian-named cafe with the 0,5 litre weisenbier is here. The crappy casino is there.

Lufthansa marches us downstairs from my gate to an autobus that drives us out to the "apron" (E.g. tarmac... Frankfurt has too many airplanes for the gates, so some people get to go outside to march up the stairs to board their flights, just like in the good old days!)

We board an aging 737 (-400?) and i get the feeling i'm one of the few people on the plane that isn't Polish. Perhaps people are wondering what i'm doing on the flight, but it seems to be just polite curiosity as opposed to paranoia. Given my recent misadventures with Manic Panic, their curiosity is probably warranted.

The flight is about two hours. As the plane is just a few hundred feet from the end of the runway, i look out the window to the side and see a snow-covered airport. The taxi-ways with moving airplanes on them seem to be little deer-trails through the snow. "HOLY SHIT" i think to myself, "M. wasn't kidding when she warned me that Poland is like Pakistan... have these savages even cleared the snow from the main runway? Is my plane going to skid off into a frozen field and erupt in a ball of flame? What the HELL was i thinking, coming to Warsaw in the middle of January?"

As it turns out, they do have functioning snow plows at the Warsaw airport, and the landing was uneventful. While waiting to pick up my luggage, i changed some USD for Zlotys (at a remarkably bad rate -- next time, i'll just use my ATM card and get a better rate) so that i'd have some cash for the taxi.

I'd gone through (EU) Passport Kontrol in Frankfurt, so after getting my suitcase and walking down a hallway and through some doors, i suddenly and unceremoniously found myself completely free and on my own, in a very large, open, chilly, foyer with scores of people speaking a language i'd never really heard before, over 5,000 miles from anyone i know, except for this one fascinating, funny, smart vegetarian woman i'd come to meet, who was currently nowhere to be seen.

I wandered through the crowd of arrivees, greeters, and hopeful taxi drivers, and after a few minutes M. and i saw each other. She came over, we hugged, and she kissed me on the cheek. She was strangely familiar and very much like i imagined her (based on the pictures i'd seen and our conversations over the past month or two). She'd thoughtfully brought me an apple and a sandwich to eat, and we climbed into a cab she called to take us into the city. I was sleep deprived and jet-lagged, and two weeks later, i have no recollection of what we talked about on the ride into town.

Warsaw was still covered in snow. The trees were bare, and the sky was a solid, grey, perma-cloud. It was exactly like i remember Chicago winters. .

I checked in at the hotel, and M. accompanied me to my room so i could dump my stuff before we went out for food at Vega. In the hotel room, i emerged from the bathroom drinking a glass of water and M. demanded to know where i'd gotten the water.

"From the sink?" i hazarded.

"You shouldn't drink that," she said, shaking her head.

So.. cold like Chicago but also with unfriendly-to-my-guts bacteria like Mexico. As it turns out, they have some really yummy beer there, so i just drank that instead of plain water. (OK, OK, i drank a lot of tea, too.)

If you get a chance, you really should try Ciechan's Midowe. It's a beer brewed with what must be a ton of honey. It's quite delicious and tastes almost like mead. You can get it at Cykloza, a vegan cyclist cafe.

We walked each other sort of halfway home (M was worried about me making it back to my hotel, and i was worried about her making it to her flat). When i arrived at the hotel, i bathed, and then dozed off after watching a few minutes of the Fellowship of the Ring on the hotel TV. I turned off the TV and went to sleep around 22:30, figuring i'd wake up on my own around 9am.

First, The Pictures.

January 15th.

Day One is all traveling. Poland is Central European Time (7 hours ahead of Austin), and the flights and layovers from Austin to Warsaw are 18-20 hours, so it's impossible for me to arrive on the same day.

My friend S. was kind enough to drop me off at the airport. It's kind of appropriate for S. to drop me off for my trip to Warsaw in the dead of Winter, because he's Canadian. Well, he's also a U.S. citizen now. (The natural thing for me and most people in the U.S. to say would be that he's also "American" but that's not actually what we mean, because everyone from Canada, all the way down to Tierra del Fuego (and, of course, including the various islands also considered part of the Americas) is "American." And since i've been talking a lot with M. who's Polish, about U.S. customs and habits, i've needed to use an adjective to describe people from the United States. For example, "No wonder some people from the Americas think people from the U.S. are arrogant -- we've (probably unintentionally) mis-approporiated an adjective for two whole continents just for our much smaller country."

Now that i think about it, perhaps this is why we have these immigration problems with people from Mexico and Southwards: These other Americans hear our politicians talking about how we are making jobs, defending, and doing other helpful stuff for all "Americans." And so these Central and South Americans logically assume that this also means them, because it does! Maybe this whole immigration problem could be solved if all of us people in the U.S. would just stopped being arrogant, misappropriating (geographic) morons!)

Unfortunately, i don't really have any good suggestions for what people from the U.S. should be called. "United Stateseans" sounds stupid. I mostly just say "U.S." Of course, before the (U.S.) Civil War, we were Texans, Illinoians, or Marylanders, but after the end of that War, the U.S.A. went from being a plural to a singular, and so began the great homogenizing that has culminated (so far) in us all watching the same stupid TV programs, eating the same crappy fast food, and coming to believe that the word "American" describes just people in the U.S. Maybe we should call ourselves "Homos" because we are clearly the Great Nation of Homogenation!

Uh.. hm.. yes, so my (mostly) Canadian friend S., drops me off at the airport, which is appropriate, because i'm going somewhere similarly cold and dark AND i have my Sorel (Canadian) snowboots. It was appropraitely grey in Austin:

I can't remember if we left on time, but i had plenty of time to sit around at IAH (Houston) and watch the U.S. Customs and Board Protection decide what to do with a wayward piece of luggage:

Eventually i left on a Boeing 747-400 operated by Lufthansa, and flew all through the night to Frankfurt, Germany.

One of my favourite cartoons of all time is The Apprentice, by the Canadian animation master, Richard Condie. (He also created The Big Snit, and Getting Started.)

I can remember seeing The Apprentice back in like 1991 or 1992 at the Village Cinema Art theatre, and laughing so hard and so long that i though i might die from lack of oxygen.

And now, i can look at the big goofy Sun from it anytime i want, as long as i can still see and have this right arm.

The wonderful Ms. Mess also added to my right arm a sage in a hammock on the beautiful chinese-brush-painting tree she had tattooed back in June. (The hammock is tied to the tree.)

The New York Times has published an interview with John Yoo. He's was on a book-promo tour. In case you don't remember, he was instrumental in contriving various arguments for how the U.S. Constitution and other laws and treaties the U.S. is party to (like the Geneva Conventions) did not apply to Bush, Cheney, et al.

Here are a couple of choice excerpts:

NYT: "Do you regret writing the so-called torture memos, which claimed that President Bush was legally entitled to ignore laws prohibiting torture?"

JY: "No, I had to write them. It was my job. As a lawyer, I had a client. The client needed a legal question answered."

In otherwords, "Just following orders." This defence was ruled insufficient at the Nuremberg war trials. If he had had any serious moral objections to excusing torture he could have quit - it wasn't even as if he would have been shot for desertion like the German soldiers who really were often following orders.

NYT: "I see various groups are protesting a decision by a California government lawyer to teach a course with you that starts on Jan. 12, claiming he is legitimizing your unethical behavior."

JY: "At Berkeley, protesting is an everyday activity. I am used to it. I remind myself of West Berlin -- West Berlin surrounded by East Germany during the Cold War."

These guys (Yoo, Gonzalez, Cheney, Bush, etc.) amaze me. They really don't seem to think they did anything wrong, at all. And apparently, they're not going to be prosecuted for violating our Nation's most important laws. Which, i think really means we are no longer a nation of laws.

So what are we to learn from that? I guess we're supposed to feel free to kidnap John Yoo, put him in a secret plane, fly him to Afghanistan or Eastern Europe, lock him in a secret prison, and then beat and torture him for months. Because laws don't matter -- he was even the person who wrote the memos that said so.

Honduran Congress votes to keep out Zelaya

A quick recap: Back in June, after months of making noise about or actual attempts to get Honduras' constitution rewritten so he could serve more than the constitutionally-limited one term, Manuel Zelaya was convicted by the Honduran Supreme Court of violating one of the inviolable and unalterable articles of their constitution. He was (legally) arrested (by the military) and then (illegally) ejected from the country. Soon after, the Honduran Congress voted in support of the Supreme Court and the military.

But for whatever reasons, most world governments and groups of governments condemned this action, despite the fact that it was essentially in defence of democracy, against dictatorship, and Zelaya's removal was pretty clearly within the rule of law. The best i can figure is that the members of most governments don't like the idea of strict or absolute limits upon their powers, even if they are being legally enforced by other parts of the same government. That, or their a bunch of drooling morons, or some combination of both.

Regardless, once a government has taken a stand, what they really, really hate is to admit they are wrong. And the Obama administration is no different. Initially, they condemned Zelaya's removal as a "coup." Months later, after Zelaya snuck back into the country and forced everyone's hand, they "negotiated" a "settlement." (Some reports indicate they basically threatened to politically break everyones' arms unless they at least appeared to settle.) This momentary settlement (and it really was just momentary -- Zelaya almost immediately began to violate the agreement) was apparently enough of a pretense for the U.S. to retreat to, and save face.

Of course, Zelaya, being the self-obsessed dictator-wannabe that he is, soon sealed his own fate by denouncing the "settlement" and repelling the U.S. (and other governments) from his rapidly stupidifying position. The result is that he's gone down in flames, exactly by the terms of the "settlement." And, of course, the U.S. and everyone else are pretending that they don't have a bunch of egg on their face, because the legitimate government of Honduras threw out a soon-to-be-dictator, then stood up to all but a few governments of the world, and proceeded with their scheduled elections, despite massive interference in what was clearly their internal affairs, and to top it all of, suffered horrible and cruel economic sanctions for about 5 months -- sanctions that really hurt the poorest people of one of the poorest countries in the entire world.

I predict that -- despite their earlier threats -- most of the world's governments will unceremoniously recognize the new elections as legitimate, and just pretend like they weren't a bunch of reactionary dickwads. And they'll quietly abandon Zelaya to his fate -- presumably exile in Brazil or Venezuela.

And what about Honduras? I'm sure the U.S. and most of the other American states that (stupidly and immorally) took such a hard line against Honduras won't forget the egg on their face, despite the fact that it was entirely their own fault (and much deserved). And this is truly sad for Honduras, because ultimately, i think they were just trying to abide by their constitution, and avoid becoming yet another Latin American country that has returned to the days of "dictator for life."

Watching this unfold over the past half year, i can't help but see our similarities with other monkeys -- hooting and hollering at each other in political roll-calling and posturing. But we're the only species asserting our superiority and higher intelligence. It all seems to be in a sad, sad attempt to avoid the obvious conclusion that most of the time, as Jeffrey Goines said, "We're... all.. monkeys."

I got out of bed about 16:00 today. Staggered around the house, drank some fruit juice and a bunch of coffee until i felt vaguely human, and then started working on Elfi about 17:40. Around 21:30 i went to dinner, and came back around 22:45, and worked some more, until about 01:15.

I have just about all of the electrical system working now. (There's a reading light that may be burnt out, and the high beams probably aren't wired to anything.) I replaced the 12v flasher with a 24v i got off the 'net, and the remaining weirdness with the turn signals and stop light disappeared (i was seeing 6v on those lines even with nothing activated).

I replaced the corroded rear wiring junction block with a new junction block (now with cover) near the back of the vehicle (underside), and wired everything up with crimped on ring terminals. I ran new wire from the new junction box to the right rear tail light. I even hooked up the license plate light, according to the wiring specs. It all worked on the first damn try. Tucked all the wiring up underneath the dash, secured it, bolted everything down, and attached a panel that stradles the steering column that wasn't attached when i got Elfi. (I recognize what it was after seeing pictures of other Pinzgauers.) I installed the rifle brackets on the passenger side, and bolted on the front license plate. (I did the rear awhile back.)

As far as i'm aware, Elfi is now good to go. :) This was immensely satisfying. I finally understand why so many people enjoy working on automobiles. I took something that was busted, fixed it, following the specs, and now i can drive places in it. If it breaks again, i'll fix it some more.

There's still more to do, of course. I noticed when i was crawling around underneath with the head lamp that the heat-exchanger is missing some ducts to connect it to the heating system. It's also got a few small holes i should patch, too. And i think i'll take it in and get the muffler replaced... supposedly this can be a pretty cheap (like $300) fix that makes the truck quieter.