randyorr.net

I’ve spent the last two days driving up the Pacific coast of Northern California and Oregon. It’s a beautiful part of the country – even with lots of rain on both days.

I find it hilarious that the hotel tonight costs about the same as parking for one night in San Francisco.

I put together a small video of all the clips taken with my cellphone, but the wifi here at the hotel isn’t allowing me to upload to vimeo or youtube. I’ll try and get it up the next time I find a decent connection.

I drove from Flagstaff, AZ to San Francisco, CA today. Eleven hours of driving is waaay too long. I’m gonna try and plan shorter drives from now on.

As I was driving in on I-580 heading toward the Bay Bridge I looked to the left and saw a huge portion of a freeway overpass that had collapsed onto the road below it. I had no idea what had happened until I got to the hotel and saw several blog posts about it. Apparently a gas tanker exploded and caused the overpass to collapse. Thank goodness it happened early in the morning and no one was killed.

650 miles on the road and I’m now in Flagstaff, AZ. Just realized that I forgot the usb cable for my digi cam. Oh well, it’s so old and clunky I hardly use it any more. I’ll just have to make do with the phone cam.

Went out to the historic downtown area of Flagstaff. Pretty cool place, lots of restaurants, bars, and such. Had a few cold ones and some food and now back to the hotel for an early start tomorrow.

roadtrip day 0 on Vimeo

I just finished reading Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things. It’s a collection of mostly short stories and a few poems. One poem in particular stood out to me above all others. It’s called The Day the Saucers Came and it was originally published on the spiderwords.com website where you can still read it. I think I enjoyed it because it’s so easy to read it one way and then flip it around and read it in a completely different manner.

If you were wondering why I quit my job working in IT you can refer to hugh macleod. He nailed it.

Ok, so I just finished my taxes. The pile of forms and documents and papers that sat on my desk being ignored for 3 months will have to be replaced with something else that I can properly ignore and put off for a couple of months. On the bright side I can now see the back of my desk. I never really looked there, but every time I walked past I could sense it in my peripheral vision. I didn’t think that pieces of paper could taunt a human being, but taunt they did.

Procrastination is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. I refer you to Paul Graham and ze frank for more enlightened views.

Finally put the css back, though I did kinda like the way it looked without.

Well, CSS naked at least. Go to the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more info on why. It really doesn’t look that different. Not sure if that’s a good thing.

I didn’t go to MMS2007 this year because I’m not actually working as a Windows sysadmin. I’m not actually working as anything anymore, and that’s kinda nice. That doesn’t mean I don’t care about the wonderful world of system administration though. Far from it. They just announced that PowerShell will be shipping as part of the next version of Windows Server. This is most excellent news. Powershell is one of the most exciting things MSFT has done in the area of system administration in a long time. In my experience the 3 most important tools for any sysadmin are:

1. patch management tools
2. interactive shell
3. scripting language

Powershell covers two of these, and does a decent job of it too.