When I was 16, we got my driver’s license on the first day possible.  Dad was eager for it, so I could releive my mother of driving duty to the hospital (Wally had lost his central eyesight some years earlier and couldn’t drive by then).  I griped about the drive a lot, and he would sigh and try to tell me that it was his responsibility and his job.  That part is true, but I really think it was his passion– It was all about providing for others.

About twenty years ago I went to lunch with my father.  Hat in hand, I was once again asking for “help” with tuition money.  I say help, but he wasn’t “helping” by paying half or 20% or something, he was writing a check for the whole amount.  It burned him that it was for BYU (and not his beloved University of Utah), but he wrote the check just the same.  Embarrassed and humbled, I muttered some thanks and apologised.

“What are you apologising for?” my father asked.

“For taking your money.  I promise I’ll pay it back,” I sheepishly justified.

Rolling his deep blue-grey eyes, my father came right back. “Nonsense.  What do you think my money is for?  I have a house, a car, and even an old boat.  We go on vacation every year.  I have 5 healthy kids and several grandchildren.  If I can’t spend money on my child’s education, what else would I do with it?”

It was the most honest moment I ever had with him.  He was being as realistic and clear-headed about the purpose of life as he could: it was all about giving.  It was all about providing for others.

In his career, Wally Jenkins M.D. saved thousands of lives.  He mentored dozens if not hundreds of medical interns.  He fixed more boat engines while up to his armpits in cold Jackson Lake water than any man I know.  He gave up medical junkets to exotic locales in order to save up vacation time for week-long adventures through the national parks.  At 17, he skipped his high school graduation dance in order to be on a troop train to Chicago to serve in the waning months of WWII.

Dad never asked for anything himself, even when he wanted something.  He had a coy way of suggesting, “do you want some ice cream?” knowing that whoever he was asking would likely bring him a bowl as well.  It simply was not in his nature to think of himself.

In these last few years, after losing his wife and living alone, we would talk about how I was doing and a couple of errands about this or that.  Even then, he would still ask me if there was anything he could do for me.  To be honest, I never did pay back those tuition checks.  There was no way he would have taken the money if I tried.  To his last day, he was still providing to others.

I promise I’ll pay it back, Dad.

Wallace Jenkins, 1928-2010. Funeral services for Wallace Jenkins will be held at the LDS Church on 13th South, Wasatch Blvd, Salt Lake City on Saturday March 13th.  Services begin at noon, with a viewing the previous evening at the same location.

Backcountry.com has a webfarm at a hosting center, and then a rootdb back at the warehouse– pretty standard setup. For the sake of speed, however, the company wanted to hold as much information (i.e. dynamic content) as close to the web servers as possible, and therefore wanted to replicate a good chunk of rootdb out at the ISP. If they were using Oracle, this would be a relatively straightforward configuration. However, because the system was built around Postgresql, we needed to configure something out. Enter the geniuses as End Point Communications — an entire system of flags sit around data tables, and these flags are synced back and forth, to determine which data then needs to be pushed to the other side. The trick here is to have the 2-way asynchronous flows of information while maintaining basic ground rules of data integrity.

The system has had several months of getting the shit beat out of it, literally. Early on, syncs would hang on a missing flag, or an unsuually large amount of data, and things would back up, only to then try and flow through like a traffic jammed freeway once the flags fell back into place. Well, redundancies have since been built into the messaging system, and the logic has been wrung to optimised levels where flags that don’t need to be in place are simply bypassed afte x minutes. It’s all rather elegant.

Props to all those that were involved with this, and special props to those at End Point who suggested the path to enlightenment lie in giving back to the community.

Dilettantes. Middle-class schnooks with some disposable money chasing the big payoff but not enough patience nor smarts to really pull it off. They’re not the suckers down at the Cash-n-Go, and they’re not the rational thinkers at Morgan Stanley, they’re in-between. They know someone really rich, and think that they are just as smart (but they’re not). They work, and they probably save, but not enough. They invest, but regret those investments because they didn’t buy Google.

The Dilettantes come in waves. They were multi-level marketers in the 80s, day-traders in the late 90s, and web developers soon after. The Dilettante Economy revolves around, provides the toolsets for, and celebrates the rare winners (just like a Casino billboard on the freeway that promises you Freedom) within this demographic. Shows like “Flip This House” and “Property Ladder” fed on this, just as Countrywide Loans and all those other loose finance companies made real dollars enabling all this poor behaviour. Before this wave, eTrade, Charles Schwab, and Ameritrade made their mark with fees from the day-traders, and NuSkin, Avon, and Amway before then. Hell, I could trace this economy all the way back to Levi Strauss: the California Gold Rush of 1849 brought a lot of dilettantes, but it was ole’ Levi who got rich by selling them blue jeans sewn from the surplus sailing canvas torn from the ships rotting in San Fransisco Bay.

The New York Times picked this up (and actually did some interviews, unlike my cheap rants here):

“That is an income Randy Haddadin would have welcomed. Mr. Haddadin, 38, moved to Miami Beach in December 2003 from Washington, after leaving a job in information technology. He promptly got his real estate license.
[...]
Mr. Haddadin is now weighing his options. He might seek a job in information technology again, or perhaps help a friend open an Italian restaurant in Miami Beach, while selling real estate on the side.”

In other words, this guy jumped on the IT thing when that was hip, burned out when his skillz weren’t enough, then hawked property. I hope his pesto sauce actually has some punch behind it, because he sure sounds like a Dilettante to me.

So, now that the Dilettantes can no longer feed on each other and the suckers below them, now that the interest-only floating-rate NINJA loans are gone, what is the next big thing?

My guess: debt collection and repo men. I am working on my ‘How to Succeed at Finance Recovery’ kit right now. It goes on sale next month for $499.

Each of these partners invariably wants to place a 1-pixel image somewhere at the bottom of the page. What could one little pixel hurt, right? Along with this pixel are passed a whole host of variables about the origin of the browser, the last page they were on, how long they’ve been there, shoe size, whatever. Well, some sites have two or three– others have a dozen. To me, these things are suckerfish– small little animals along for the ride that eat up the leftover bits from whatever the Great White Shark of a website had for lunch that day. Sure, a suckerfish doesn’t seem so bad– but if a dozen are stuck to the belly– they’ll start to slow things down a bit, and probably cramp the shark’s style (to carry the metaphor):

1. Suckerfish usually come from an external site, so there is no load on the host website’s infrastructure. But this remote call means an additional DNS lookup for each suckerish, along with whatever network problems may be between the browser and the suckerfish’s home. This means that every page of every site is making a half-dozen DNS lookups. (Note to self: Buy stock in Foundry and Cisco)
2. If a suckerfish is late or slow, that wheel in the corner keeps on spinning– cueing the browsing customer that the website “isn’t finished downloading yet”. Well, guess who gets the blame for that? That’s right– the shark, not the suckerfish.
3. Most of these suckerfish are asking for the same data points 80% of the time: search engine source, browser type, time on page, cookie ID. Why can’t someone invent a ‘universal suckerfish‘ as a service, and pass that along to all the other fish? I wouldn’t mind so much if there was just one or two on my site.

I fear the issue will only grow in size– as more and more marketing schemes are invented (not unlike financial derivatives and options), the need for more and more data will increase, and site owners will be tempted to tap in by filling their footers with these suckerfish. The problem may soon come, however, that as these fish return some marketing data (upsell, crosssell, recommendations, marketing-spooge) in real time to be displayed, we may see race conditions– suckerfish A returns some data to the site for display, which in turn sets off new data from suckerfish B, which in turn sets off C, or worse, resets something back to A, and we have a race condition/runaway train. The problem here is this would be difficult to detect, as the site owner may or may not be tracking all of these remote connections, nor have access to the data structures and algorythms that are driving these fish. (tracking would require more suckerfish, right?)

Zimbra

• Zimbra lands a major client that should ensure their financial stability in the short-medium term (good for me as a customer)
• Theoretically, this is 12 million possible openings for people to be exposed to an SOA architecture instead of a clunky application on the client (Outlook sucks)
• With such a large potential market, married with the open API/architecture inherent with Zimbra, we should see a whole host of new and interesting Zimlets come into being
• Comcast mail really stunk up until now. The new interface should be pretty sweet– even though I never use Comcast mail, I may give it a try now

Zimbra advocates and utilizes an open source model, with paid-for software in a ‘deluxe’ version.  This is similar to the MySQL AB business model.  I don’t think it is as good as the straight GPL-centric model of Red Hat, it may be a necessary midway model for applications that have enough gravity to charge for ‘licenses’ while still utilizing the Open Source Welcome Mat to gain market share.

Cheryl Preston, a law professor at Brigham Young University, wants to ban open wifi networks, on the off chance that teenagers might be driving around looking for places to download their pr0n (away from mother and father and all their uber-effective pr0n catching nannyware on the home network, I guess). Nevermind what the loss of open wifi networks would do to the coffee shops, the downtown alliance, and the general good vibe we have as a tourist-friendly resort town that comes with having free and open wifi scattered around town thanks to the good souls at XMission. Pete  Ashdown, owner of XMission and former candidate for the US Senate, was even on the radio today denouncing this idiotic proposal, to which a supporting legislator defended the concept by equating open networks to ‘unfenced backyard pools’. I see– so the entire body of American self reliance, free choice, not to mention the illegality of trespassing should be thrown out the window for the sake of having the State step in to keep those rascally kids outta the pool.

There is no surer sign of a weak mind than hiding behind the children and the faceless threat of pornography.

In the end, these idiots are attempting to foist off responsibility for their children on to the State, because they obviously cannot teach their teens how to cope with online pr0n as responsible parents. That’s right, Cheryl– leave the raising of your children to the government! Let The State bring them up strong and true! You stupid fascist.

1. Microsoft has enough business analysts on the payroll to realize that Open Source is unstoppable. Individual companies may falter, but the code and model are pernicious and maleable enough to resist any attack. It’s like sweeping ants in the jungle– there will always be more.
2. Microsoft knows they must come to Open Source eventually– but where? where to pull in OSS without damaging the cash cow? The OS. Noone really pays for the OS anymore, not real money. Sure, we all pay support contracts, but not big cash. Eye candy makes money. For Redmond, the money is the apps. So, where to find an OS partner… Red Hat? too religious. Ubuntu? too foreign. Mandriva? unknown. Debian? communists. Novell? aha– desparate for the bandwagon, jonny-come-latelys, good market share, lotsa cash laying around. In a word: suckers.
3. Microsoft does a deal, and Novell signs over their souls, and the partnership has begun. Here’s the problem– does Mircrosoft ever really partner with anyone for very long?
4. The next day, sure enough, Steve Ballmer is out making fun of his new friends. Novell desperately tries to paint on some lipstick for their new boyfriend because he’s out trash-talking. The community begins to turn, Novell stock drops
5. Now, a few months later, Novell fesses up and starts to admit that MS is the better ROI. That’s right, bitch– make me a sammich and get me a beer, too. The stock will only drop further.
6. Soon, maybe 18 months from now, the stock will be cheap enough that Redmond will get out their checkbook. What’s worse, with that whole SCO nightmare still loose, MS may find itself the owner of some core UNIX intellectual property. If/when that happens, all our lives get washed down the toilet.

Am I crazy? God I hope so.

Bonus Tracks!
There was a moose in the backyard the next morning!

2. Click on each thumbnail to see the photo, and then click on the photo to get the original (huge) suitable for printing (save to your harddrive first). Alternatively, there is a printing service attached to this website where you may order prints ($.20 per print i think).

3. I would expect some smarmy, snappy comments from this crowd. Please login, and you can comment on each photo.

Enjoy!