Archive for January 28th, 2009

So if Murphy’s law states that “if it can go wrong, it will,” then is his cousin the one that states “if things could possibly be incredibly frustrating, they will be?”

There are a lot of conferences every year, for all kinds of fields.  In academia, there are quite a few, too, such that overlapping or back-to-back situations happen a lot.  On the other hand, for the most part, I notice that conferences of the same type don’t usually happen at the same time.  So technical conferences – how to manage a lab, stuff like that – are in early summer, then maybe late summer, then maybe in the fall.  Management conferences – the big one in Educause – is in the fall, as well.  But people who go to Educause are not usually the ones going to the technical conferences.  

However, right now I am facing a situation where the Law School Admissions Council – LSAC – has started a new, senior IT-related conference called ESCON (electronic services conference) and is actually significant subsidizing attendance.  It’s a big move on their part.  This is law school specific, though, yet it’s also leadership/management related.  Lots of admissions officers will be there, too, but part of the goal is to get the two groups together.

Now, that is from April 1-3.  Of course, as Murphy’s Cousin’s Law dictates, while usually management conferences are going to be spread out, the ACM SIGUCCS Spring Management Symposium, which is designed for those aspiring to be higher-level managers/CIOs/etc, runs from March 30-April 1.  I have applied for a grant to attend – again, very generous and I would be incredibly grateful if I were selected.  

But…c’mon.  Seriously?  One ends on April 1 and the other begins the same day?  And I don’t find out about the SIGUCCS grant until February but I book airfare for the ESCON now, which means I might leave SIGUCCS a day early, fly back to the San Francisco area, then basically meet my wife at the airport to change the contents of my luggage and jump on a plane to fly back to the eastern time zone for the ESCON.  And obviously if I get the grant I will go to both (I also have been wanting to go to the management symposium for a while now).

And yes, both are in a the eastern time zone, so I have to factor in minor jet lag, too.

Sigh.

la lune and the photographer

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

My wife composed this and asked me to pose while I was standing on this rock taking all these photos (1 & 2) of the sunset at Morro Bay.

I remember that the first photo she took I had my head at this weird angle that, while natural in terms of my own comfort, looked weird. So I did this somewhat exaggerated “turkey neck” pose to get myself looking like I was gazing off into the distance. The wistful, lonely photographer. Staring at the moon at sunset. Ah, so poetic.

My wife did a great shot, perhaps the favorite one of myself. Of course, I’m not sure if it’s saying something that my favorite shot of myself is a silhouette…

A little while ago, I wrote a short article on the drobo, from Digital Robotics (as compared to all those analog ones floating around), and how I was debating switching my “redundant mass storage” options.

The short story is that so far, I’ve had a server on a local gigabit network where I have a RAID 5 array (which uses 4 drives and gives me the storage equivalent of 3 of them, and any 1 of them can die and I’m okay.  All drives have to be the same).  Anytime I want to upgrade I have to replace all 4 of them, which is a pain.  At the least, I have a lot of drives I don’t need right away (I mean, I can use an extra drive now and then but 4 all at once?).

A Drobo unit has a few advantages.  First, it gives the best of JBOD (just a bunch of discs, which appears as one big disc) with RAID 5 (some form of redundancy where one drive can fail and it’s okay).  Second, it connects directly to our computer (though there is a network interface unit that is available separately) so I don’t have to push over a network.

The problem was cost – it was $500 new, then I could get a $50 rebate.  But for $450, with the parts I have from previous computers I’ve built, I could basically spent about $450 and have 4 hard drives, whereas I would be buying the Drobo, 4 hard drives, and a Firewire 800 card for my computer.  All told about $800-900.

Eventually, though, I decided the benefits were worth it.  First, I can just slap drives in there as I want.  Yes, I decided to buy new 1TB drives, but I “only” bought three and over time as they become full, when the new…1.5, 2, or even 3TB drives become available I can stick one of those in there and I have a whole lot more storage.  I don’t have to buy all 3TB drives and then have all these extra drives lying around.  Second, even though most reports indicate that firewire 800 cards on Vista 64 bit only run at about Firewire 400 speeds, that’s still pretty fast, and fast enough for me.  Afterall, people do full video editing with Firewire 400 external hard drives.

Also, it’s one less computer under my desk, and I can take my server and actually put it in someone else’s apartment and it becomes my remote backup.  I could do this with a new local machine, too, but each time I run out of storage on the array I’d have to buy _2_ sets of new drives.  Overtime it makes sense.

FWIW, I’m already at 1.7TB of storage for just my photos.  I am well into “big storage” range.