* * * * *

                              The past two weeks

> **From:** "Ken Maier" <[email protected]> <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
>  **To:** "'Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner'" <[email protected]>
>  **Subject:** RE: FW: The Boston Diaries Update Notification
>  **Date:** Mon, 4 Apr 2005 08:41:22 -0400
>
> but as an aside, I'd like to thank you for keeping your blog updated and
> not falling into the category of people who start something and don't post
> to it anymore. I'm never sure what to read on your blog Sean and I'm always
> entertained. Keep up the good work! ;-)
>

Note that Ken [1] sent that earlier this month. And what do I do in response?

Not update for two weeks.

Sigh.

Since my last update [2] I've:

Tuesday April 12^th

       Sometime in January I tried renewing my driver's license and renew my
       car's registration online (Florida DMV Online) [3] but while it
       looked like it worked, I had yet to receive my driver's license or
       registration. So I set aide this day to look into this matter at the
       DMV office.

       Or rather, offices [4]. The closest office to handle driver licenses
       is in Lantana (only a couple of miles from Casa New Jersey) but they
       don't handle car registrations; that office is in Lake Worth (again,
       only a couple of miles away from Casa New Jersey, but in the other
       direction). No big deal, just take the day off from work (of course)
       and hit both offices.

       My mistake was in not hitting the driver license office at 7:30 am.

       When I arrived around noon, there was a mob of people outside.
       Pushing my way inside I found another mob of people waiting in line
       to get permission to wait in line. This convinced me that I might be
       better off trying to do this by phone. Only (after I got home) the
       phone was busy (imagine that) so I tried the online thang again.
       Seemed to work this time around.

Friday, April 15^th

       Taxes.

       Ouch.

       Just … ouch.

       I've heard cries about simplifying the tax code, possibly going with
       a flat tax to make things simpler. Only it's not the actual tax
       calculation which is hard (if it's less than US$100,000.00 you look
       up the amount on a table, and if it's over that it's 25–35% of your
       income, depending upon how much it is and what your filing status is—
       but the worksheet for that is simple)—it's the definition of “income”
       which is hard. Lines six through fourty-two of Form 1040 [5] exist
       just to figure out your taxable income (that's 36 lines and up to six
       schedules and four forms).

       Having a flat tax won't make that go away.

Saturday, April 16^th

       The House Chillin' Party [6].

       It was great! Most of the people invited showed up, and much food,
       drink and conversation was had. The rocket launch (The Kids found a
       model rocket when we moved in) was successful (once we figured out
       that the launch key had to be shoved way into the launch control
       unit), and the parachute deployment was successful, but the winds
       carried the rocket away to [DELETED-a private golf course-DELETED] an
       inaccessible area—I just hope we didn't scare any [DELETED-golfers-
       DELETED] indigenous populations with its landing.

       By the way, the Words of Wisdom we asked people to bring where strung
       up across the living room [7].

Last week at work

       At the House Chillin' Party I managed to talk to Mark and Rob about
       the broadcast copy [8] idea I was working on (Rob is now a senior
       Unix administrator for Negiyo and they're responsible to updating and
       managing hundreds of servers across two dozen or so groups so any
       insight he has is great) and both didn't like the idea of multicast
       or broadcasting changes around. They also weren't keen on the idea of
       polling [9] for updates. So I may just go with the O(log n) method of
       pushing files out.

       So I slipped into another related project—that of monitoring a large
       number of servers. I do know that SNMP (Simple Network Management
       Protocol) [10] is used here to monitor the various routers and
       switches, but it seems that since I last looked at it (late 90s) it's
       been extended (since it is extensible) to include host information
       (you can even monitor processes! And installed packages! Wow!). So
       not only have I been installing NTP (Network Time Protocol) [11] on
       all the servers (slowly, working my way through the list) but also
       SNMP.

       Smirk also wants to use Cobalt RaQs for various infrastructure hosts,
       like DNS, since they use very little power (about 35W vs. 250W for a
       typical server). I've already set one up as a firewall, but more
       about this in the next entry.


That pretty much brings us up to date.

[1] http://www.kenmaier.com/
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2005/04/11.2
[3] http://express.hsmv.state.fl.us/
[4] http://www.hsmv.state.fl.us/offices/palmbeach.html
[5] http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf
[6] http://www.livejournal.com/users/springdew/272146.html
[7] http://springdew.com/images/livejournal/wisdom.jpg
[8] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2005/04/11.1
[9] http://www.infrastructures.org/bootstrap/pushpull.shtml
[10] http://www.net-snmp.org/
[11] http://www.ntp.org/

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