Eric’s Blog

It’s almost a week past Christmas, and a LONG time since this story happened, but it’s one that I always remember. One Christmas I had in the Army- I think it was the last one I had there (I was saving my PTO to get home early after my tour was over in 8 months). So, the old mess hall at D 1/1 ADA was pretty barren- most anyone that had any common sense went home to be with family, but a few of us didn’t. So the skeleton crew left behind didn’t have much of a decorating spirit- we didn’t even have a tree!

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Z and I wanted (well, I did more than she did due to the cold weather) to get away for a few days, and do some camping at our top-secret camping site. The picture below on the left was taken on our last night there when the clouds lifted. Our site is about 3400 feet up, so we get the opportunity to be above the clouds most of the time. This is a pretty typical view, and once the sun goes down, the stars are absolutely amazing.

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For about a year or so now, I’ve been running Solaris 10. It worked out pretty well when I had a account that I piggy-backed off of from work at Shutterfly. Those days are over now, and being over at Yahoo!, I don’t have that privilege anymore. That’s quite alright as OpenSolaris is available. So, OpenSolaris comes out with a new build about every two weeks, so it was time to go with b77, and do the migration. I had some key things I wanted:

1. All customization has been done in CFEngine. I’ve been faithfully keeping my Sol10 system’s config current in it, so building up a new system should be a breeze.
2. All PXE based (pxe + dhcp > bootparams + rarp).
3. Make it so that I can self-replicate the server to a new system, so I can replicate it back when done.

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Driving to work this morning, I’m reminded of something that frequently gives me the blues. It all starts when I’m listening to one of (at least for me) the ‘holy trinity’ of Jazz musicians- Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, or Miles Davis. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to Giant Steps, A Love Supreme, Kind of Blue by Miles (the album where I have an almost spiritual experience from), and any number of albums by Parker. The downer obviously is that I will never hear anything new from them. Oh well. Right now at work, I have Cousin Mary from Giant Steps going, and it’s absolutely sublime. I suppose I should just get over it. Cheers.