sean’s place

“The politics of the small”

I greet you, my fair blog, from Colorado Springs where I am attending the Colorado State Democratic Convention and Assembly. In addition, I attended and voted in the Congressional District 4 Convention and Assembly, held in the very same place.

In addition to the chat and networking opportunities with fellow Democrats, I must admit to being awed by a single thing: the resounding support of CD4 Democrats for Betsy Markey.

Betsy entered the CD4 Assembly to a fanfare of drums. Following many (and often tedious :)) nomination speeches, Betsy finally took the podium. There, she delivered a rousing speech outlining her goals as our district’s next congresswoman. She touched frequently on the “politics of the small”, the negative, divisive, and damaging politics that infects our system today. “Big problems require bold solutions” she says, a line that continues to echo in m mind over and over again. She stood tall, calling for a “uniquely American” system for universal health care, a withdrawal from Iraq, and the need to rebuild our middle class. Big problems — bold solutions, indeed.

Finally, to toot my own horn before I sign off, if you listen to AM 1310, you may hear an interview of yours truly on Ken Clark’s show. If you hear it, let me know what you think

Posted in Politics | 1 Comment »

Letter to the Editor

Editor,

Northern Colorado is quickly becoming a hub for the new energy economy. If the recent opening of the new Vestas wind-turbine blade plant, Woodward Governor announcing 100 new jobs for their wind-turbine inverter business, AVA Solar Inc.’s plans to open a new manufacturing facility in Del Camino and the new Colorado State energy research “super cluster” are any indication, the future looks bright.

Just as we did for the oil companies in their heyday, we can help spur additional investment in the region with tax credits and other incentives. Unfortunately, our House representative, Marilyn Musgrave, recently voted against such a renewable energy stimulus package. In fact, over the last few years, she has consistently supported the oil companies and the “old” energy way.

It’s time to ensure that our interests are represented in the U.S. Congress. Unlike Musgrave, Betsy Markey has renewable energy high on her priority list: She wrote: “We have a unique opportunity at this time in our history to change the way we power this country. Colorado is poised to lead this effort. Our state’s wind, solar and agricultural energy supplies offer opportunities to create jobs, protect the environment and decrease our dependence on foreign oil.” I have no doubt that she would have voted to secure the long-term economic and energy security of the region by voting “aye” to the Renewable Energy and Energy Conservation Tax Act of 2008.

Sean Rees,
Fort Collins

Update: This letter has been printed in The Coloradoan and The Journal Advocate.

Posted in Politics | No Comments »

Welcome to episkey

Welcome to episkey!

I’ve started to transition my primary services (starting with the web stuff) from my home network to my new server installed at Red Rocks Data Center in Morrison.

I will be moving more stuff over the weekend.

Posted in Geek | No Comments »

Hunting for Colocation

While I might not be such a do-it-yourselfer around the house, I certainly am when it comes to the Internet.

Case in point: my email, web, and IRC infrastructure.

When I moved to Fort Collins, one of the first things I did was obtain a Comcast Business Class cable connection for my home. I did this for the purpose of running my own e-mail, web, DNS, and IRC servers on my own. Setting all this up was a marginal cost increase over a residential cable modem (due to the relatively inflated costs of Internet access in Colorado — thanks Qwest!) plus hardware.

However, like residential cable, business class still suffers from being a “best-effort” IP delivery service. Comcast likes to do “maintenance” at odd hours and this causes interruptions to my service. In at least two events over the last 3 months, my connection flapped wildly for hours at a time. This sort of behavior really isn’t conducive to running a reliable IT infrastructure, even if it is just for me (and a few others)!

So, I’ve decided to expand my scope and look for colocation. I have a 1U short-depth rack mount server that’s on its way and I’m looking to install it in a facility with a bit more data-oomph that I’ve got. I’ve looked at a lot of different companies throughout Colorado, including Front Range Internet, Red Rocks Data Center, EarthNet, RockyNet, and NeTrack. I’ve tentatively decided on NeTrack.

NeTrack offers the best bang for my buck: $75/month for the rack space and 200kbit (95th percentile) of bandwidth. However, I’m principally concerned over two things: 200kbit is probably too low to be sustainable and their slow/nonexistent response time to requests. I’ll saturate 75% of that 200kbit initially with my current traffic patterns and their bandwidth overage charges are very high. What I’d really like is someone who can provision me 512kbit (read: breathing room) and stay competitive with the $75/month rate. Native IPv6 would be a major plus, too.

I suppose I’m what you might call a high-powered IT hobbyist.

Posted in Geek | 2 Comments »

Cat Maintenance

I took my cats in to the shop, er, the vet today for their (belated) annual checkup and shots. Talk about an experience.

I took my cats to the VCA Fort Collins Animal Hospital; home of a friendly staff and moving dust. As part of their annual checkup, these folks do blood work and urinalysis in addition to the shots, the physical exam, and the great poo float (if one remembers to bring in poo samples!).

As it happens, the blood work was just too much for my little ones. The vet tech took each cat, one at a time, to “the back” to perform the extraction. To make a long story short, the process scared and pissed off both cats. They had such a rough time with the rest of the exam (hissing, swatting, biting, screaming) that the vet and the techs weren’t able to finish it! In an unusual mood, Max took to biting, hissing at, and attacking everything (before falling into the trash bin) — including the vet, her sister Alex — but, excluding me. I was apparently the only one who could calm her down. (I feel so loved.)

I left the cats at the vet to calm down (and so they could finish the exam!) and proceeded to work (by way of home to pick up a second carrier and a new shirt). I picked up the little ones 2 hours later and drove them home to a symphony of sad meows. I decided to stay home to supervise, just in case Max was still having violent tendencies.

I’m happy to report that no cat-on-cat confrontation has occurred, though Max is holding a pretty significant grudge at the moment. I think it’ll be a while before she forgives me. But hey, at least they’re healthy (pending results of the blood work)!

Posted in Cats | No Comments »

Technology Shuffle

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing some shuffling of my computer equipment. It’s been an interesting process to optimize everything.

Recently, I setup a 500GB mirrored array in valiant (an IBM PC Server 325 ; P2 300/192M). I found that in this configuration, I maximized at 10MBps writes to the array and 3.8MBps peak over FTP (GigE with 7936 byte MTU).

I moved the array into relax (P3 1GHz/1.2G) and am now getting 30MBps writes to the array and substantially better network performance (15MBps; but I need to rerun these tests as they were contaminated by a background fsck). Huge improvement! (I could probably achieve even better performance in a faster box). NFS still sucks, though.

I finally bought a new laptop - a 15″ MacBook Pro (2.4GHz variety). It’s tentatively called aparecium and it rocks. The old laptop, spiritfolk (an 800MHz Titanium PowerBook), is boxed and headed to California to assume new duty as my Mom’s laptop.

Other thoughts - I am likely retiring flyer (the kitchen iMac) and valiant in the near future. I’m slimming down the equipment as I optimize!

Braindump complete. You may now continue about your normal activity.

Posted in Geek | 2 Comments »

Lime Barley Salad

My internal combustion engine has been firing on all cylinders today. I’ve been going for health and whipped this up with some left-overs: a lime-barley salad.

Whisk in a mixing bowl:

1. Juice of 1/2 a small lime
2. 1/6 to 1/3 of a cup of olive oil
3. Pepper to taste

Then add and stir into the bowl:

1. 1 cup of baked pearled barley (to bake: in a greased oven-safe dish, add 2 cups pearled barley, 1 can beef consomme, 16oz beef broth, a pat of butter, and (kosher) salt to taste. Pop in the oven at 400 F for about 1 hour)
2. Diced yellow bell pepper and red onion (as much as you’d like)
3. Some shredded or otherwise small greenery (I used mixed baby greens)
4. Half a small red tomato, cubed.

Eat.

Posted in Food and Coffee | No Comments »

IRC

00:04 <@Bender> nowadays parents wouldn't even let their kids onto IRC at age 13

00:04 <@Bender> but back in your day, they didn't even know about it

This got me thinking about what might have happened had I not been active on IRC in my early teens.

From approximately 1996 (age 13) to 2001, I was active on DALnet, SorceryNet, and marginally, EsperNet (as well as several smaller networks).  (you may remember me — I went by ‘magician’ then, often in #StarTrek on DALnet).

00:05 <@eri> had I not got on IRC, i would likely not be a software engineer now

IRC introduced me to a community that completely reformed my way of thinking about computers. As a result, I got into Linux, FreeBSD, and NetBSD. I got into compiling and installing open source packages on my own (including really early and hairy releases of KDE). I still remember (albeit a bit foggily) when I made the precipitous decision to completely erase Windows 95 from my PC in favor of Slackware Linux (kernel 2.0.29!). The community I found shaped who I became; I am avid Unix geek, an IT generalist, and a hacker (see the proper definition as it relates to software development).

I’m glad my parents let me onto IRC (most of the time).

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Stalking

(02:05:28 PM) Dave Paul: got you bookmarked so i can stalk you
(02:05:32 PM) Sean Rees: sweet.

Posted in Silly Stuff, Work | No Comments »

Recent Updates

It’s been a busy few weeks. Lets see…

At work - we’re making a concerted effort at work to get our product development cycle to the “Feature Complete” state. This means that all the prescribed features are implemented and that after this date (3/31), we will be in stabilization (”polishing up”) mode. As a team, we opted to make our ‘death march’ a twice weekly event (with company-provided dinner) instead of a whole-week pain fest right at the end of the cycle.

At home - I had the pleasure of entertaining David over the last few days. He was gracious enough to drive out from California and hang out with myself and Mary. We enjoyed some cycling along the city of Fort Collins trail system and out in Lory State Park. We visited some breweries and did some evening outings in downtown Fort Collins and Boulder. Fun was had all around.

In the community - I’ve started volunteering for the Betsy Markey for Congress campaign as a writer. Due to the incredible workload at work, I haven’t had time to put my thoughts to text. I’m hoping that when April rolls around, I’ll have more time. In addition, I’ve been selected as a delegate to the statewide Democratic convention in Colorado Springs as a delegate for Congressional District 4 and for Larimer County. Yay!

In the eCommunity - I’m actively (as active as I can :)) executing my role as a server administrator on EsperNet. I’m also heading up efforts to replace the IRC daemon currently in use with a custom set of patches to ircd-hybrid. So far so good!

In my glass - New Belgium Springboard. Yum.

Posted in Food and Coffee, Politics, Silly Stuff, Work | No Comments »