Derailment
A Train Of Thought That Jumped The Track

Apple's icon for their new Thunderbolt I/O port looks suspiciously like the ISO warning sign for high voltage, don't you think?

I put this note on my Facebook profile on New Year's Eve 2010. It's good to maintain perspective on all aspects of one's life. Living as we do at "internet speed" we can easily get caught up in thinking that such-and-such isn't fast enough or that we just can't exist another second without $SHINYTHING. We live in an incredible time and we should appreciate it more.

By the way: this list was somewhat inspired by Louis C.K.'s appearance on Conan O'Brien's show that went viral as the "Everything is Amazing and Nobody's Happy" video.

Almost to 2011. I'm a big fan of maintaining perspective on things, so here are a few interesting things that happened 100 years ago, in 1911.

First U.S. coast-to-coast flight arrives in Pasadena, California after a journey of 49 days, during which the pilot, Calbraith Rodgers, made 69 stops and 16 crash landings and was followed by a train carrying spare parts. It had only been eight years since the Wright Brothers first flew for two minutes at Kitty Hawk. You can now fly non-stop across the country in a few hours.

The U.S. Supreme Court dissolves Standard Oil using the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Successor entities become Exxon, Chevron, Amoco (among others) which are still with us today.

New York Public Library building at 5th Avenue dedicated by President Taft. 73 years later, the Ghostbusters show up. Taft is nowhere to be seen, however.

First running of the Indianapolis 500 auto race. The average speed was about 75 mph. Today's Indy 500 speeds average over 160, with top speeds over 220 mph.

Ground breaking begins in Boston for Fenway Park. The Green Monster is soon to be born.

The first public elevator begins service at London's Earl's Court Metro Station. The date of the first passing of gas in an elevator remains unknown.

Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen becomes the first person to reach the South Pole. Local penguins are unimpressed.

Procter & Gamble unveils its Crisco shortening as a healthier alternative to lard. Hydrogenated oils enter the American diet and we've been getting fatter ever since.

I'm getting excited about the speaker list at Surge 2010. Lots of top talent, and all will be talking about challenges faced, mistakes made, and lessons learned in building scalable systems. I am particularly looking forward to hearing Bryan Cantrill talk about building enterprise solutions from commodity components, which is a big part of what I do at OmniTI.

Bryan has some fascinating stories from his days at Sun Microsystems, and he's an amazing speaker who has been described as "Tigger on speed". I'm hoping for a reprise of his characterization of a hard drive that unexpectedly reset when a high LBA was requested.

I'm planning to attend Velocity 2010. I've never been before, and I'm looking forward to learning new things and meeting new people. Devops is a popular term, and we live it at OmniTI, so I'm excited about bringing back knowledge to improve it in our operations and development teams.

Sony has announced that it is ending production of the venerable 3.5" floppy disk. Additional coverage at Ars Technica.

Things like this cause me to wax nostalgic (a sure sign of advancing age, at least in Internet terms,) but I'll simply recall that my first OS (MS-DOS) came on something like 3-4 floppies. We also thought the boot-sector viruses that often rode around on floppies were a terrible scourge. If only we'd known what was to come.

So, it's almost 2010 and there's no sign of my jetpack. That's fine, it probably wasn't such a great idea anyway (it would suck to commute in the rain). What I am excited about is smart power grids.

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Where's my jetpack?

Happy 2008. We're a little behind, you know. We're supposed to be going to Jupiter by 2010. As it stands, we might make it to Mars in my lifetime. Apparently we're too busy with all the other pressing matters before us.

Computer technology is a fast-paced industry. Even though I'm directly involved in it, I'm still sometimes unaware of just how quickly it evolves. Today I was thinking back to my first semester of college, which began 15 years ago this month. Yikes. I already feel some perspective coming on, the kind where you find yourself saying things that begin with, "In my day..."

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Recently I saw one of Shell's Real Energy TV ads. I have TiVo, so I'm used to zipping through ads, but this one caught my eye because it was a good bit longer than the usual ad. This spot featured a Shell engineer working in Southeast Asia, who was being interviewed by a local reporter about the work Shell is doing there. I won't go through the whole story, but to summarize, after the interview, the engineer is sitting in a restaurant with his teenage son, who is drinking a milkshake. The kid slurps the last bit from the glass and his dad says, "Do that again." He has a "eureka moment" which leads to a design for a flexible drill that can snake into otherwise unreachable places to extract oil.

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