A Learning Experience

First, a story from back in the day, back in Genesis. Like most of Genesis, you have to take it with a grain of salt. A literal interpretation will make your brain start to hurt. So, let’s just take it for what it is: a story about the diversity of language:

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

Okay. Kinda interesting. Get a bunch of people together, see them have An Idea. See them Work on The Idea. See Progress.

As we grow up and we start to try to differentiate ourselves from our parents, we start to have Ideas. Our parents, being much older and wiser, look at these ideas and think “that is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of”.

But before that, there were Challenges.
The Cinnamon Challenge.
The Ice Bucket Challenge (which actually supported a cause).
BUT BEFORE THEN…
Maybe parents look at these ideas and think they’re stupid because they had their own Ideas.
Swallowing Goldfish
How many people can fit into something that no longer exists?

and so on.

We live in a media-saturated world where such things as YouTube celebrities and Professional Video Game Streamers exist. So our Ideas reach audiences much, much earlier these days. And much like the phone booths, they too will fade to be replaced by something else, because we all grow up.

In many ways, the story of the Tower of Babel is the story of a transition from teenage indestructibility into mortality.

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

We can ask why God chose to stop this Idea. In that sense, trying to understand God’s intentions is impossible. The answer is always “BECAUSE”. Kind of like a parent.

This is why I don’t worry too much about my kids, and neither should you, especially when it comes to any alarmist trend breathlessly reported by the internet.

I do tech stuff, and here’s a headache for you:
you have a node that’s running docker version 17.09-ce. You have a jenkins process that will .ssh to this node, then do some fun stuff like connect to aws to grab images.

First try after setting up credentials and all that: aws ecr get-login . Spits a bunch of stuff out, but when you try to run the resulting command, it bails on the -e email parameter, because that’s deprecated.
So you follow the advice and use the –no-include-email parameter.
And that should work.
But your jenkins job fails. And keeps failing. It hates that –no-include-email parameter.
Turns out you have to install awscli twice on the local node.
You have to pip install –upgrade awscli , then
sudo -H pip install –upgrade awscli

Why? Who knows? It just doesn’t work otherwise.

I’m testing some little things that may be of use next week.

Or not.

We’ll find out.

It’s been roughly over a year since I last posted. A lot has happened since then. I don’t really feel like going into the reasons why, but suffice to say that everything is as usual okay. Not great, not spectacular, but also not lousy.

I am considering transitioning this site to become a longer-term project, but for now, it is what it is.

And so the machine has to reside in the DMZ to have outside people access it…
But you can’t use an insecure port, because people are picky about that…
Then you have to try and collate years of results into meaningful data…
VMWare? Why hast thou forsaken me?
Huh. So that’s what a Gomertz equation is…
“STOP BARKING AT THE SQUIRREL YOU STUPID DOG.”
Need iced tea. Probably need something stronger, but I have limits…
There was a stick of butter on the counter…
Why is the Virtual Machine not even showing up like the other one? I mean, they’re in the same place, doing the same thing, but THIS thingawhatzit doesn’t match THAT thingawhatzit and google has failed me….
Did the dog eat the butter?
How do you turn data into something of value?
I don’t see a wrapper…
Got the tea. Do we have cookies? No? Grumble.
There’s Halloween candy.
And I’ve tried setting things from DHCP to manual routing, and nothing seems to work. I can’t even update packages, although ostensibly the machine says it’s connected…
That package from where? Oh, yes. I’ll be here tonight.
Dinner is… fajitas. We’re low on tortillas. We’ll have to make do and leave 1 for Jacob in the morning.
Must get more.
And probably more butter.
And dog food.
Preferably stuff that tastes like butter.
To the dog.
I’m not trying it.
I’ve been working on this for pretty much all of two days, and I’ve made glacial progress. Glacial as in pre-anthrogenic global warming glacial.
Cookie dough is in tomorrow. Oh frabjous joy.
Did the doorbell ring?
No.
Maybe it was the dog plus butter.
But will past work actually indicate some sort of change, especially since there are always new twists to every project? Do I need to put some sort of derivative meta-measure in to allow for future “progress”?
WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE OTHER ONE WAS A 32-BIT IMAGE. THERE IS NO 32-BIT IM… oh. There is.
So putting a 64-bit image of a VM doesn’t work.
I should write that down.
Stupid dog.

trim.VEaPPw

I had the distinct pleasure of going to Webelos Camp with Jacob last week. We left Wednesday morning and came back Saturday morning. The camp was located in beautiful Pottsboro, Texas, right on the shore of Lake Texoma or somesuch (no, I didn’t really check. They just told us that 42 feet out into the water was Oklahoma territory).

I felt bad in terms of preparing Jacob for the trip. One of the courses to take is Aquanauts, and for that, you have to pass a swim test. Jacob doesn’t know how to swim, so he was classified a non-swimmer. That meant he couldn’t go deeper than 3 feet of water in the pool without a life vest. Parent failure #1.

However, he and his friend Greyson camped together. Some other parents shared a tent with their kids, but in two years, he’s supposed to go camping on his own. Hopefully by then we’ll have worked out the “keeping yourself clean” issues. He wore his swimsuit under his shorts and didn’t change out of them the entire camp. I don’t think that’s normal, but then again, I only made it to Bears.

I got the chance to talk to other scout leaders about the entire Homosexuality issue. For those of you who haven’t paid attention to the news, the scouts decided that they will no longer discriminate against sexual orientation in their members. They still don’t allow LGBT leaders, but as far as acceptance goes, this is a pretty good start.

Personally, I’m in favor of the change, primarily because for younger scouts (namely Jacob’s age and younger), sex isn’t an issue. Girls still have cooties. However, I can see it start to come into play around the time that kids become boy scouts.

Naturally, the decision is going to come with a cost–the Southern Baptists have decided to not recharter any scouts sponsored by one of their churches, and that is expected to cost the scouts somewhere in the area of $40 million. If they can keep going without that, so much the better. However…

The one question that I’d never really considered until talking with other leaders was “when you go camping with a gay scout, where do you put them?”

This sounds like an innocent question, but the ramifications are:
(a) two gay scouts sharing a tent
(b) a gay scout with a straight scout
(c) virtual ostracism of the gay scout by being alone in a tent

I think the one thing about these choices that makes me upset is that they make the fundamental assumption that a gay scout will be a sexual deviant toward other scouts. And frankly, I don’t think that’s a fair assumption to make. We don’t consider “straight” scouts to be any more or less deviant. And we still have issues of leaders (straight leaders, mind you) who are predators.

I’m not gay. I can’t walk in those shoes and understand what the attraction is. However, if we are to allow homosexuality in scouts, we have to confront that underlying assumption and work to change it. And the only people who can help us do that are the gay scouts themselves by their behavior and conduct. I truly believe any incident will lead to immediate pressure to reverse the decision, even as we ignore the previous molestation cases by (again, straight) leaders.

In the end, I guess it will work out. We’ll just have to see.