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...