Category: Musings

So often we only hear negatives in life.  People in customer service only hear complaints.  In the office you likely only really ever receive commentary when you forget to put the cover sheet on your TPS report.  In Emergency Services, all to often you only hear about pain and suffering and death, anger and sorrow, but seldom ever praise.  In software, you hear how your code is wrong, not about the parts that are right.  As a mechanic, you hear about how you didn’t do something the way the other person would prefer, you seldom ever hear how those newly rebuilt brake calipers and new pads just saved someone from a horrific accident.

Just the other day, I received a rather simple email from a colleague in response to a release announcement I had sent to a distribution list that I maintain for internal and external customers:

Your emails are a joy to read.
Clear, informative and well written.

I guess you get that feedback pretty often, but in case you don’t
(because I guess we tend to not praise that often), here it goes.

I always think it, but I think I had never said it.

Pretty simple praise about something completely ordinary and part of my day to day work.  But in context they are so much more.  First, the colleague who sent me that note is not a native English speaker.  For her to state that my emails are clear, informative and well written is pretty high praise.  It means I am doing a good job of reaching my audience, many of whom are NOT native English speakers.

Sadly, like so many others in this world I actually do not get that kind of feedback, ever.  Every once in a blue moon I hear something positive, but most of my interactions are of the typical sort:

“Why hasn’t X been completed yet? What’s the holdup?”

“This doesn’t work. Fix it!”

And so on.  This is made even worse in my case by the fact that I work alone, from my home office, with limited physical interaction from anyone at all.  Most of my interactions with colleagues are via e-mail, IRC or video conference from time to time.  Once or twice a year I get to see some of them at a company event of some sort, but most of my travel is to customer sites so I seldom see my work friends.

The point is that when I read her email, I experienced a few moments of true happiness.  To get something so simple, yet so unexpected was pure joy.  Her email brightened my day (well, my week actually) and had me smiling and actually made me feel a LOT better about some other things I’ve been dealing with at work lately.  We often forget these simple niceties, not realizing just how much of an impact they can have on other people.

So I’d like to challenge anyone who reads this to do the same.  Send a note of thanks to someone random.  Tell them briefly why something they did was GOOD, not bad.  Tell them that you appreciate the good things they’ve done.  Spread just a bit of positivity around and make life just a little better for someone else.  Just like buying a cup of coffee or a drive through meal, paying it forward can be as simple as saying “Thank You” and meaning it.

Wow. The Brits really DO know how to hold a protest…

More than 500 people are expected to sit on each other’s faces and simulate sexual acts outside Parliament this week.
The #PornProtest will use mass ‘facesitting’ to protest against new UK porn laws brought in earlier this month.
Under the new Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 rules, facesitting, spanking and female ejaculation are among a number of sexual acts now banned from being shown in paid-for porn watched online.
The new rules – which will not affect porn created outside of the UK – have attracted huge amounts of criticism.
Protesters are now organising mass action outside Parliament on Friday, where they will try to break the Guinness World Record for facesitting, and will hold a ‘Sex Factor’ game show – while remaining fully-clothed.

Read more at the link…
Porn protest: Mass sex simulation and 'facesitting' to take place outside Parliament – Telegraph.

Someone posted something on Facebook recently indicating that a sign that you’re from NC involves the song Wagon Wheel:

32. “Wagon Wheel” will never, ever get old.

Whenever this song comes up, you turn the radio (or your iPod, you techies) up and sing along because it reminds you of home.

You’re also territorial about it and don’t appreciate non-North Carolinians loving it so much.

However, having lived in two of the places that song sings about, my head still can’t wrap around the geographic gymnastics used in the lyrics… this, in particular is patently impossible (unless you’re driving the long way around the earth):
“Walkin’ to the south out of Roanoke
I caught a trucker out of Philly had a nice long toke
But he’s a-heading west from the Cumberland gap
To Johnson City, Tennessee”

First, lets consider the premise of the song. He’s headed south towards his baby in Raleigh, NC. Fair enough, I’ve done essentially that many times coming back from Boston, DC, Baltimore, NYC, Montreal and parts of Virginia.

He’s “walking to the south, out of Roanoke”. That means he’s on one of two roads. Interstate 81 South, or US 220 South. If he’s as familiar with how to get to Raleigh as the song indicates, then he HAS to be on US 220, because ANYONE who knows where Raleigh is in relation to Roanoke, or SW Virginia in general, knows that I-81 doesn’t take you anywhere near Raleigh, especially if you hope to get there anytime soon.

Next, our narrator says that he “caught a trucker out of Philly”.

If you’ve done ANY sort of road travel at all, you know one thing. Truckers know where the fuck they are. And they know how to get from Point A to Point B the fastest. And a trucker headed out of Philly, passing through Roanoke, only really has one choice considering the rest of the lyrics. He has to head south on I-81. Unless he’s gone the long way around town through Charlottesville and US 29 south towards the lake, or south via Richmond then US 460 W.

But the song indicates he was out of Philly, headed to Johnson City TN… and there’s no way a trucker headed to Johnson City from Philly would be on 220 South. Well, there’s a chance, but slight.

Then we REALLY take some leaps on the map. It turns out our friendly, Ganja smoking trucker (and perhaps this is why he’s so lost) is “a-heading west from the Cumberland gap To Johnson City, Tennessee.”

Really? Because it’s impossible to meet a trucker heading west out of the Cumberland gap, if you’re in Roanoke, since Roanoke is better than 210 miles east of the gap.

And Johnson City, TN is 78 miles ESE of Cumberland Gap, so if you’re driving west from Cumberland Gap and headed for Johnson City, you’re going to be driving essentially all the way around the globe before you come back to JC, TN.

And if you’re walking south out of Roanoke hoping to make Raleigh, you’re on 220 headed to Greensboro, NOT I-81 headed to TN, as I-81S actually runs WEST through VA, and 220S takes you even farther away from the Cumberland Gap where the mysterious trucker is supposed to be driving from. Even more so if that Trucker is out of Philly, and if he’s headed to TN, he’s on I-81 South, not 220 South.

So anyway, while I LOVE that song, and I love Old Crow Medicine Show, and that song really does make me feel homesick when I’m out and about in the world, as someone who notices little details like that, (You should have heard my wife’s reaction to my picking apart the show “Bones”), the lyrics make me cringe every time I hear them…

Sometimes I really hate being a pedant.

Patches and I the night after I brought her home

Friday night, I took Patches on one last Hurrah, a road trip, just like the two of us used to take, to the beach… In our early days, she’d accompany me on my “Guy Weekend” which really amounted to little more than me going to the Outer Banks to drink beer and surf fish at Oregon Inlet. We always camped in the state campground there at the inlet and spend our days on the sand, me pretending to fish, her not pretending at all to want to eat everything she could find that washed ashore. So it seemed fitting that I give her that one last night on the beach, just Patches and I, like it used to be.

She seemed a little distant on the trip down until I rolled down the windows to let the fresh country smells into the truck. Almost like a magic elixer, she lifted her head and started the scent radar, swiveling her head this way and that, smelling the late summer crops, the fresh cut grass, the hint of smoke from an occasional backyard fire.

Saturday, I spent most of the day just laying with her on the floor of my parent’s house in Calabash, kissing her forehead, stroking what remained of her silky fur, soaking in the deep, intelligent brown of her eyes. That evening, once the tourists had departed, we sat on the sand of Sunset Beach, just outside the reach of the encroaching tide watching the blue moon transit the sky, listening to the crashing waves and the occasional dog and human passing by. A few complete strangers walked up to us, lavishing her with praise and love and affection, just like she’s always seemed to get from total strangers. She was a beautiful dog. More so than most, and I don’t say that because I feel I have to.

We sat on the beach until after Midnight when I finally packed us up and headed for home. Sunday, we loaded up in the truck and made the trip back, but at this point something was different. She had stopped drinking as much as she usually did and I had resorted to adding water to her bowl of food to trick her into hydrating herself. She didn’t perk up much on the 3 hour drive back to our home of 10 years but she did keep her eyes on me, staring into me, keeping me fixed with her Border Collie Laser Gaze.

The two of us on the Outer Banks

Sunday passed languidly, with me spending most of my day on the floor with her, stretched out on a king sized comforter that I had folded in quarters to make a nice bed for her to spread out on. Just as earlier, she was disinterested in water but kept her healthy appetite, so I continued giving her “soup” with the rice and chicken I had been feeding her. Dana wanted to know if our trip had perked her up enough to go back this coming weekend, but I had to tell her that no, it was time.

Labor day proceeded with me not attending cookouts, nor sitting with my buds drinking beer and doing whatever it is people do in groups on Labor day. Instead, I worked that morning and some of the afternoon, then spent the rest of my evening on the floor in my now accustomed place with Patches stretched out at my side. Dana had managed to find a kind soul at work who covered the holiday shift so we could spend the evening at home together with our First Dog. Together we sat or laid in the floor with Patches until 2 am when I finally had to call it a night. I gently scooped up The World’s Best Dog In The World and carried her into the bedroom. For one last night, she slept between us.

Early on, she learned a sneaky trick. She’d hop in the bed and sleep at my feet, but she didn’t really sleep. No, she waited. Then she would inch herself up between us, just a few inches at a time, sometimes taking up to an hour to get to the right place. She had the patience of a military sniper, crawling through no-man’s-land until she reached that perfect spot. Once she got to where she could get the best leverage, she’d put her back against mine, and her feet against Dana, and push with all her might until she had created a Patches sized valley between us where she would sigh deeply, lay her head on me and finally fall to sleep for the night.

So Monday night, we put her in her spot, right between us, and we slept like we did before. And sure enough, as weak as she was, she rolled over and pressed her back against mine and spread out her legs. She may have lacked the strength of youth, but she gave it her best effort and snuggled between us with a deep, happy sigh.

This morning, I didn’t want to wake. I wanted the night to go on forever, unstopping because I knew what had to be done today. Reluctantly, I crawled from bed, used the bathroom, let the other dogs out. I started a pot of coffee. I looked at a magazine. I crawled back into bed to rub on Patches some more. Anything to avoid the harsh reality ahead. But finally, I made The Call to our trusted vet who promised to come all the way out to our house in the sticks to send Patches over the bridge. We spent a very special morning, petting her, kissing her and stuffing her full of all her favorite treats, whether they were safe treats or not. She got two small steaks, which we cut into bits and fed her by hand. She got her chicken and rice, which I’m positive she preferred over her kibble and veggies anyway. She got M&Ms and a bit of a chocolate bar I brought back from Europe on one of my recent trips overseas. She got crunchy bacon, cooked just for her. She ate a LOT of ice cubes… it wasn’t drinking, ice cubes were a treat! And most importantly, she got a cupcake. Her very own cupcake, which she wolfed down almost whole. You see, it’s just into September. Her birthday was in August and with everything going on, I had missed it. So today, her very last treat was her 12th Birthday Cake which she ate as I sang Happy Birthday to her.

That smile I will miss for the rest of my life

When the vet called to let us know they were about 30 minutes out, we packed up the how and moved outside to the shaded space between the trees in our back yard that Patches would always retreat to on hot days. We spread out her comforter so we could all lay on it and we all sat there, as a family, sobbing, sniffling, crying, laughing and smiling as we remembered the good times and all the love that Patches had given over the years. We all were there, Dana and I, Patches, Jazz and Faith.

As the vet arrived and began setting up her equipment, I blubbered out the last few things I wanted Patches to know. I told her how she was the first dog that was 100% mine. How grateful I was that she chose me that day 12 years ago when I went to look at a litter of Border Collie pups. I told her how proud I was of her, and how brave she was. I told her how much I loved her and how I would carry her in my arms to the bitter end… I told her to tell Jack that we miss him, and that she should wait with him on their side of the bridge. And as the Vet administered the shot, I kissed her on her forehead, and whispered into her ear as she breathed easy at last, “That’ll do, Patches. That’ll do.”

Pickup trucks are funny things. Many people who own them really don’t need them, a lot of people who do need them use them pretty heavily, and most of your friends will never own one but insist on using yours every time they need to haul something they don’t want to put into their own cars.

I fall in between. I could probably get by without one, but find life in the country a LOT easier with one. I can haul trash to the dump site without having to ride in a car that reeks of old food. I can move dirt, rock and lumber around as I need it to work around the house. I can haul things to the thrift shop that wouldn’t fit in the car. Anything you can do I can do better… I can do anything better with a truck!

For the longest time, I had a decent truck. It was a 1989 Ford F-150 that has seen a LOT of miles. It was my dad’s truck before he bought his newer Silverado. It has been camping, mudding, and on the beaches of the Outer Banks. It’s been fishing, hauling and on vacation. It’s been grossly overloaded with gravel or dirt more times than I care to admit to, WHILE towing a fairly overloaded trailer as well. It hauled a 23 foot boat with no trailer brakes and three nearly flat trailer tires from Richmond, VA to my home. In short, it served me very well over the years, and I have a special place in my heart for that old Ford.

But as with all good things, they must come to an end. Ol’ Red started developing weird electrical problems. I spent hundreds, possibly thousands over the years with mechanics, each one who claimed they had “Fixed the Glitch”. Then one day, on a trash run, Ol’ Red just died on me, right in the middle of the road, with only enough inertia to get us into a gravel driveway.

It was some time before I started looking for a new truck. The intention was to fix the old Ford, but as time went on, fixing yet another problem became a debate on when it was time to stop putting money into the old, worn out Ford and put that money into a newer truck instead, that will, hopefully, be problem free for a few years. As time wore on, going without a pickup became a problem. We were hauling trash in my wife’s new Hyundai. We hadn’t taken the larger things to the thrift shop because they don’t fit in her car. The driveway was developing really bad potholes because I no longer had a way to haul gravel in without paying someone for a dumptruck load. Projects around the house were not being done because we had no way to haul lumber and dirt and mulch.

So I started looking. I looked high and low, to and fro, for a truck that met my special needs. I wanted a V-8. No pansy V6 for me. It had to be Four Wheel Drive. A RWD truck would probably have been fine, but honestly, there are just times when you need all four wheels turning. It had to have a extended cab. The old Ford was a regular cab, and when taking dogs to/from places, that regular cab could get crowded quickly. It had to be full-sized. I liked the idea of a smaller truck, but I know myself, and I know that I’d quickly overwhelm a lesser truck simply because I like loading them up with as much stuff as I can squeeze in.

New truck comes with DOUBLE RAINBOW

I would love to have picked up a 3/4 or 1-Ton model, but the only ones available in a price range I was willing to pay for a vehicle I’ll drive no more than 4 times a month were either super high mileage (200K+ miles), beat to hell, or both. The ones that DID fit my mileage requirements and all the other requirements mentioned before were way more than I wanted to pay. I’m not using this for my daily work, so I don’t need to spend that kind of money. In the end, I found a nice, used 1/2 ton truck that should do what I want it to do.

It’s got some issues, sure. But they’re all cosmetic. The doors have some rust on them and there’s a rust spot above the exhaust pipe. But the rest of the body is rust free, as is the frame, undercarriage, floor pans, and cargo box. Mechanically, it’s in great shape. There are no leaks around the transfer case or diffs. The axels and joints look good. Brand new Bilstein shocks on all four corners. It shifts smoothly and 4WD works like a champ.

And the best part, it’s the truck I always wanted. It’s a Dodge Ram 4X4 Quad Cab in Forest Green. It’s a bit older, a 2001 model, but it only has 111K miles AND not only has a V8, it’s got a 5.9L (360ci) V8. So welcome New Truck. I’ll be sad to see Ol’ Red go, but he’s destined for Craigslist now. Maybe someone can fix the gremlins and have a decent truck to use for work, farm or whatever. or perhaps his old organs will be used to resurrect another truck or more. But for now, I have a new truck, and I’m itching to haul some dirt, fill some pot holes and get some lumber to fix some things on my deck that have been bothering me. Dana wants some trees and I want some seedlings for the garden. And now we, once again, have a way to haul all that.

I’ve got a long list of things that I’ve been meaning to write about. It’s an ever growing linked list of items that I thought would make good fodder for the interwebz but I’ve been so busy for so very long that I really find it difficult to take time these days to just sit and write. Sooner or later, however, I have to start. I’m funny like that. I’ve got dozens of projects waiting in the wings, just waiting for the time or energy for me to get them started. This reboot of jefflane.org is one of those things and it’s something that is long overdue.

So I thought I’d start off with something that seems fairly innocuous. Title says it all, really. And this should be a simple answer, right? Well, things aren’t always as you’d think.

As most everyone knows, I’ve worked for Canonical for some time now. Canonical is the company behind Ubuntu, a Linux distribution based on Debian. My part in the ecosystem is that of Hardware Certification Engineer, now part of the Professional Services and Engineering team within Canonical. So going by my title alone, you’d imagine that I do some sort of engineering related to the certification of hardware. And you’d be correct. Partly.

But in this business, as in many others, the truth is often far different than the impression. People often think that because I work mostly from home and travel internationally that I spend a lot of time on the couch in my boxers playing video games and eating Cheezits, or drinking in bars, carousing with foreign women and exploring strange new landscapes. Well, that’s partially true, but only just.

So lets start with my daily work. I read and respond to e-mail. A LOT of e-mail some days. Part of my function is the external voice of Hardware Certification. When someone, be it a Canonical employee, an Ubuntu community member, a potential or current customer or anyone, for that matter, has a question about the Ubuntu Hardware Certification programme, I am the one who responds by pointing them in the right direction, answering what I can and helping explain policy and test procedures.

I also sit in on several ongoing projects and that generates a lot of background work, researching technology, equipment, investigating tools and other things. I write testing tools that become part of the checkbox test suite and are used in the Ubuntu Friendly programme, a community driven hardware validation initiative. The tools I write could be anything from simple shell code to complex programs and manual test cases.

From time to time I also make improvements to the two websites my team is based around, the outward facing Ubuntu Certification Site and an internal site that we use for hardware tracking and as a customer portal.

I’m not immune to meetings and may at any time be on the phone, in a meeting on either Freenode or Canonical IRC, or perhaps on a voice conference using Mumble. We’re not doing video conferencing yet but that may happen sooner or later.

Somewhere in the middle of all that I also review hardware certification test submissions, both internal and external. I pass or fail certifications based on what I see. I write the planning for the Server certification program and help steer its direction. I maintain relationships with several vendors and help them get their hardware certified and published to the web.

I also do a lot of community oriented things. I perform ISO testing at development Milestones. I have a Freescale i.MX53 ARM development board that I use to test and tinker with embedded Ubuntu and Linaro images. I have a server that I used to develop server related tests as well as monkey around with virtualization technologies like Xen and VMware and KVM. I answer questions and participate in discussions on mailing lists, and occasionally forums and places like Ask Ubuntu”. All that doesn’t even start to cover the travel.

The travel isn’t anywhere as near as glorious as it may seem. Yes, I’ve seen some amazing things. I’ve been to Stonehenge. I’ve crossed London Bridge. I’ve drank pints and eaten a LOT of meat pies at the Eagle and Child Pub, the place where J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis gathered with the other Inklings and developed stories that would end up enthralling generations of readers. I’ve walked the streets of Prague, Taipei, Brussels and Bruges. I’ve seen Switzerland, Germany, and France. But the thing no one seems to really understand is that all that is really only a very small part of my travel. The vast majority is getting from point A to point B and then sitting in a lot of meetings.

In an average year, I travel about 8 to 10 weeks. At least 4 of those are week long meeting events. Some of them are specifically to provide hands-on testing in one of our three labs. Others may be for team sprints to accomplish a set list of goals in a short amount of time. Some of them are mostly so I can check up on my labs.

Oh, did I mention earlier that I also oversee the Lab Operations for the Hardware Certification team? I purchase equipment, make sure things run smoothly, poke IS when I need to get something done quickly. I plan out updates to the labs and try to cope with the ever-growing influx of test hardware.

So while I may find a day during a weekend, or a few hours at night to go out, my going out is mostly limited to dinner, walking around the city I happen to be in, and maybe, MAYBE catching something cool, like a museum. And I’ve seen some pretty cool museums.

But the travel isn’t all as glamorous as people who don’t travel think. There’s the hours spent standing in line. First at the ticket counter to check my bags. Then at the Airport security. Then the lines to board the plane, take a piss or just buy some food while I wait for that next flight. The lines to pick up my baggage at the other end. Lines to get the shuttle bus or taxi to the hotel. Lines everywhere. There’s the hours spent sitting on my butt in random airports just waiting. There’s my personal favorite, the line to get back into the US.

So all in all, while it may seem like an easy job with James Bond style world travel, off on secret missions, meeting up with gorgeous spies and thwarting the nefarious machinations of bald yet mustachioed villains, it’s really far more pedestrian. Enjoyable, but pedestrian.

And that’s a brief glimpse into what I do. Now I must head off to bed. I have another day of work ahead of me, and a few more days until once more I’m headed out of the country. I’m headed back to my favorite place in the world, Taipei. But more on that later.