Concerns

OK, I know I'm blogging away, but this is just my first day, give me a break ;). I'm sure I'll calm down soon :).

Fuel/Economy/Leadership

I'm sure like most people in the world the economy and fuel prices have got me concerned, where is this country going and where has it's leadership been? I think the US has become more or less like Enron, it's more concerned about the people at the top than the actual people doing the work. While it's important that the people who take the risks in life get the reward for their risks, it's also important to not loose track of the people helping you. I think the leaders have lost track of the people helping. What to do about it? Well hopefully if all goes well the American people will rise up and change the leadership in November (little thing called elections). I personally think that both candiates have a bit of a rebellious nature that should keep both of their parties on their toes.

Green!

OK, I'll admit it, I'm not the most green person in this world. Would I like to own and drive a big Hummer, you better believe it! What I am though is very practical, I won't drive a Hummer until I have need to drive a Hummer, I have a very nice car (2004 Acura TL), I plan to drive it for another 10 years or so.

I like computer hardware, but I hate the waste involved (if you get a chance to go to a hosting center, go and sit next to the exhaust of the computers and feel the heat, then realize they have to fill the room with Air Conditioning to keep things cool and then think that they have many thousands of these rooms in the US), what I enjoy more than computer hardware is setting up virtual machines on one really big and really redundant server. Most of the processes that run on standalone servers could be virtualized with little or no issue, at home I needed a print server that could also handle scanned in material, so I loaded VMWare on my Ubuntu server, installed a virtual XP box, that just sits there and handles all the printer throughput, if I have to scan something, I just map over to the virutal XP box and pull the scanned in material. Once I get more RAM on my Ubuntu box I'll look into loading a virtual machine to handle my phone system or email or just to pay with (these boxes are great for development, since you can back the device up by copying the machine's image, then when you need a new environment, you just copy the baseline backup). In my previous life I consolidated 5 machines into one big machine and 3 virtual machines, to be honest it was very very cool.