Marriage Stuff

Earlier this evening, my teenage niece posted an article titled "Letting My Wife Go" on Facebook. I gave it a quick read, liked it, then shared it. The link is at the end of this note.

Two people whom I admire quickly called me out for posting something with so little substance. I took another look at it and realized that I agree. It doesn't have a lot to offer. I was reading a lot more into it than was actually there. Here's my story.

When Krissy and I got married, we snuffed the individual candles around the big unity candle. This was to signify the end of the individuals and the beginning of married life. At the time, I remember thinking that the symbolism was a bit silly while Krissy took it quite seriously. Since it wasn't a big deal to me, I went along with it without really thinking through why I thought it was silly.

We tried really hard with the "two shall become one" model for a long time. Because we were both committed to being good spouses, we had a good marriage. Nearly a decade of passive-aggressive battles held our marriage back from being great. I wanted kids. She didn't. She wanted my faith to mirror hers. I failed. There were other issues, but none of them rated by comparison.

We were attached to impractical ideals of each other and ourselves.

I desperately wanted to be a father. She desperately wanted to be a faithful pastor's wife. I think every marriage has these issues in one form or another. Some guys wish they were carefree bachelors. Some women wish they could pursue their careers without guilt. It's all dross.

I'd love to say that we've entirely let go of those ideas, but in reality we're still working on it. That said, things are better than ever - I'll go so far as to say that our marriage is great. She is okay with me being a faithless intellectual. I have come to understand her style of motherhood. Our family has grown and changed for the better.

We've learned to accept each other as we are (most of the time).

While I could frame this improvement in terms of letting go of grudges, that would be focusing on the symptom and ignoring the disease. The problem is unrealistic expectations. The result of expecting one thing and observing another is often disappointment. It makes no sense to hold Krissy responsible for my failure to see what's right in front of me: a sensual, fun, intelligent woman with her own ideas, goals, and desires. The solution is letting go. Letting go entirely is also impractical, but with practice, it gets easier to do from moment to moment and life gets easier.

I have to let go of the woman I think she could be. Every day. I'm glad that woman is a fantasy because the real Krissy is far more interesting and fun to be around.

Link: Letting My Wife Go

Portacluster

The parts are in the mail!

I've been excited about this idea for a few years now, but haven't had a good reason and/or resources to go for it. Now that my work involves traveling around and showing off Cassandra, I need a suitable demo cluster. One good rule of presenting to audiences is to never rely on the internet connection if you can help it. Murphy's Law dictates that if you rely on the wifi for an important part of your talk, said wifi will almost certainly fail when you need it most.

My original concept for the porta-cluster was to string a series of workstation motherboards together in a shipping case in such a way that they have just enough airflow and cabling to look decent but not hide anything.

But that's still a bit unwieldy with lots of problems such as heatsink/fan size/flow, where to put the PSUs, etc.. Fortunately, there's a better solution on the market now in the form of the Intel NUC:

This isn't a new development, since a pile of Mac Minis would do the same thing. I like these a little better than a mini though, because they're much smaller, about 1/4 of the size, and can support Linux out of the box. I'm impressed that these can hold 16GB of RAM and a 240GB mSATA drive, all wired up to an Intel i5 processor and a gigabit ethernet port. For lack of a better word, perfect.

As people do, I was using Newegg's shopping cart for R&D and came up with this loadout.

Server	7	Intel NUC D54250WYK1	374.99
Memory	7	2 x 8G 204-pin DDR3 1600 SO-DIMM	139.99
Storage	7	Intel 525 Series SSDMCEA240B301 240G mSATA	289.99
Display	1	GeChic On-Lap 2501B 15.6” Portable LCD	249.00
Input	1	Logitech K400 (920-003070)	39.99
Cables	8	1m Cat6 RJ45	2.78
Network Switch	1	Netgear ProSafe M4100-D12G	193.99
Power Strip	1	Digital Loggers Web Power Switch 7	139.00
Case	1	Pelican IM2950-X0001	219.00

The managed power supply will make scripting bare metal reinstallation easier since these machines don't have remote power control. The managed switch provides for two important use cases. The first is the ability to remotely enable/disable ports for partition simulations. The second is to do simple L3 routing between VLANs so I can split the cluster into two 3-node datacenters for demonstrations.

Finally, the whole thing will live in a Pelican case that is (hopefully) easy to check at the airport so I can take it to shows.

After going through IT purchasing, a couple things changed, but for the most part this is exactly what's coming. The power strip got upgraded to a small APC unit and the LCD got left out for now. I'll probably use my Droid Dock for SCALE12x and find something else later.

If you find that the UPS package tracking service is a little slow, I'm sorry. I can't help myself. The refresh button is there for a reason...

Read this NAO

Joe Armstrong is the author of Erlang, an old computer programming language that was/is decades ahead of its time and is still relevant today. He wrote a blog post that accessibly says something every good programmer understands but finds difficult to articulate.

http://joearms.github.io/2014/02/07/why-programming-is-difficult.html

日本2014訪問

One of the best and worst things about being an open source evangelist is traveling often. I am not (yet) a seasoned traveler. Every trip teaches me something new and my trip to Japan was a real eye-opener.

The primary objective of this trip was to speak at Cassandra 日本 2014. IMO it was a success. I already posted my Cassandra 日本 2014 Recap on PlanetCassandra. I also planned to vacation attend some meetups, so I stayed there for a week.

I ended up staying in Akihabara. A.K.A. Akihabara Electric Town, which hosts more anime, manga, and figma, video games, and electronics than I could possibly visit during the trip. Since I had to prepare for the conference on Friday, I limited myself to one bookstore and one bowl of ramen so I wouldn't be out all night. Score.

That's 3 Final Fantasy soundtracks I didn't have. I'm a little obsessed with the series and Nobuo Uematsu is one of my favorite composers. The cartridges are Final Fantasy IV, V, Chrono Trigger, and Albert Odyssey for Super Famicom. The Final Fantasy games and Chrono Trigger rank in my top 5 favorite video games, so for the price I figure they're neat collector's items.

Since my hotel, Remm Akihabara, is about 2km North of Tōkyō, to get to the conference, I had to take the train from Akihabara station through Tōkyō station to the 24HOUR building next to Telecom Station. Tōkyō is famous for its train congestion. Let’s just say that I have a new appreciation for the term “crowded”. While I did not see or experience the "pushers", it felt just the same.

During my talk, I wanted to get away from the tech for a few moments and decided to tell a story from one of my Japanese lessons. In one of my slides, I included the phrase “アルトビーの犬はばかね” / "aru tobii no inu baka ne?" which translates to “Al Tobey’s dog is stupid isn’t it?”

アルトビーの犬はばかね

I ran this phrase by my Japanese instructor at one point and learned about a cultural difference. It's pretty common to say things like "stupid dog" in America, but apparently that's not a thing in Japan. I had to explain to her how this is a term of endearment. It didn't work. At least I had a short story to tell to break my talk up a little.

I met some awesome people at the reception after the conference that I hope to keep up with. I'm excited to practice my Japanese with one young engineer who's also working on his English skills

On Saturday morning, I got up and had a Starbuck's breakfast of coffee and a blueberry muffin. I had no schedule at this point, so I took my time and spent some time reading. Since nothing in Akihabara was open yet, I decided to go for a random walk.

A statue near Akihabara

This is a stupid thing I tend to do when I visit new cities. I pick a direction basically at random and start walking, turning when I think it might take me somewhere interesting. I learned a bit about Tokyo, the most memorable item being that it is /very/ clean compared to any other city I've visited. I'm certain I could have walked barefoot and been safe. I did see a little trash in a few places, but I suspect it won't be there long. The other thing I really liked was how bicycles had these tiny wheel locks that I could cut with cheap tin shears. They weren't locked to anything. I could have picked one up and walked off at any time, but that doesn't happen very often. Neat.

After a while, I pulled up Google Maps and plotted a 6km course back to my hotel to refresh. In total I walked around 12km. I couldn't possibly remember the names of the districts or everything I visited, but I had a good time.

At some point I wandered into Yobodashi-Akiba. This place is amazing. Imagine if all of the electronics on Amazon were in a 9-story building and you just about got it. They literally have everything on the shelf, it's all neat and organized, and overwhelming. I didn't end up buying anything except for lunch on the restaurant level, which was delicious, but for the life of me I couldn't name it. I ordered with by pointing and saying "hitotsu onegaishimasu". I finished the evening at another bookstore, where I found the perfect gift for a friend's daughter, who is a fan of Black Butler. (I got her the art book on the bottom left)

I enjoyed some more ramen and found some more Final Fantasy swag.

On Monday, I decided to finally get out to Kyoto. I walked to Tokyo station, then rode the Shinkansen to Kyoto and arrived around 10:00AM. I had no plan, so when I saw the bus tour depot outside of Kyoto station, I decided to give it a try since I've never done such a thing before. I had some time to kill before the bus boarded, so what else to do but grab lunch?

Overall, the bus tour was fun! A headset with narrative in English was provided. My proudest moment of videography occurred at Kinkaku-ji temple. Mostly, I just got lucky. I hit the record button in video mode just a moment before a crane decided to take flight. Sugoi!

Being an infrastructure nerd, one of my favorite views was from underneath the Kiyumizu-dera temple stage, which is considered earthquake-proof and is quite old. "Kiyomizu Stage was built using a special method; huge 12-meter high keyaki (Japanese Zelkova) pillars were assembled without using a single nail and the floor was installed using more than 410 cypress boards."

I had a relaxing ride back to Tokyo on the Shinkansen and fell asleep right away. On my last day in Japan, I took another long walk around Akiba, caught up on some email then prepped to head to Asakusa, or so I thought. I made it as far as getting tickets for the wrong line before I checked my phone and noticed that I was actually supposed to meet the #asakusarb folks in Ueno, which was in the other direction. Google Translate made it possible for me to explain to the gentleman working at the gate that I needed to exit even though I hadn't boarded a train.

If you are in Japan and want to meet some really fun Rubyists, I highly recommend that you track down #asakusarb. They are a friendly bunch and are quite fun to spend time with even with a language barrier. They took me out for a fantastic dinner that I will never forget.

 

Everything was delicious, even/especially those things I hadn't tried before. Thank you again to the members of #asakusarb! I'm sure we'll meet again.

I puttered around in the morning, packing and getting ready for the return trip to California. I ended up taking the Narita Express from Tokyo station, which takes a little longer, but I wasn't in a rush and enjoyed the scenery. The flight from Narita to LAX was as good as a 9hr flight can be and I arrived home early to spend time with a very happy little boy.

Best. Trip. Ever.

-Al