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.

The original meaning of the word nightmare referred to the feeling of suffocation caused by an evil spirit. I like etymology, especially the way it illuminates changes in meaning over time. Americans are suffocating under the weight of endless "security" measures with no end in sight. Will we ever again be able to keep our shoes on at the airport? Will we one day have to be screened in the nude before taking any public transportation? Where does it end?

Maybe it will end if we stop our worst-case thinking. It's a reflex when we think about security, especially for those in positions of authority who are thinking about their accountability should "the worst" happen. That's how we end up with rule after rule, weaving a blanket of "protection" that suffocates the liberty it is meant to safeguard. That's my nightmare scenario.

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.

Weapons of Mass Dilution and the threat of New Age terrorists. Brilliant! Eerily accurate with respect to the security response:

"Meanwhile, new security measures at airports require that all water bottles be scanned to ensure that they are not being used to smuggle the memory of an explosion on board a plane."

Multiple axes of humor.

It's over. A disappointing end to a record-breaking season for the Caps, at the hands of the lowest-seeded team in the East. Montreal got spectacular goaltending from Jaroslav Halak down the stretch that kept them in the games where the Caps heavily out-shot them. Game 7 had stout defense on both sides, but the lack of power play production was the Caps' downfall. You simply cannot win in the playoffs scoring so little on the man advantage.

Coverage summary

Dennis Clarke noticed something interesting in a trailer for Disney's upcoming TRON Legacy movie. A glimpse of an "old" computer interface shows what looks like a window running "top" and another window containing a semblance of "uname -a" from a Solaris machine.

Reminds me of spotting nmap in Matrix Reloaded.

Good news for Habs fans, not so good news for Caps faithful. Last night was a pretty disappointing result despite a high volume of shots on Halak. There's a good summary and links to coverage at Caps Nut.

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.