Archive for July, 2009

The Case for Working With Your Hands

Sunday, July 19th, 2009

This article by Mathew B. Crawford in the NY Times Magazine stuck a note with me as Dad and I have been discussing the subject of “College For All” lately.

The Case for Working With Your Hands – NYTimes.com.

It’s a great (and long) read, and oh-so-true. Simply put:  Skilled, hands-on-trades should have just as much value in our society as those that require “college learnin’.”

I remember when I first got down to the farm here after leaving the big corporate job.  I enjoyed mowing 30+ acres of grass, a job that took almost two weeks with the equipment we had available.  In some cases, it almost seemed when the job was finished, it was time to start again.

Someone asked me why I liked such a mundane task.

I responded, “At the end of the day, I can look behind me at all the mowed grass and be satisfied at the sight of a job I completed.  I know ‘I did that.’  No manager is going to come along and invalidate the work.  It’s done, and it’s mine.  No one can take it from me.”

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Disclaimer, as Required by…Policy?

Monday, July 13th, 2009

Ah, what a difference a few years makes.  After being away from the then-wild-and-new blogging scene for a few years in order to finish my master’s degree, I return to a world where employers (who used to not even know what the term “blog” meant) now have formal policies regarding personal blogging by their employees.

As a result of my enjoying the benefit of a regular paycheck from one such employer, and given my desire to continue to receive this bi-monthly benefit in the form of direct deposits to my bank account, I present to you, dear reader, the following required verbiage:

“The thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog’s posts are Chuck Milam’s alone and are not representative, unless clearly and unequivocally stated, of those of any past, present, or future client or employer.”

Actually, that’s not half-bad.  I might keep that disclaimer around even after I move on to greener pastures.

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“Delete All Duplicate Files” Means Just That

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

Over the years, I’ve moved my music collection from computer to computer, and with the ever-larger hard disk sizes I confess I’ve been a bit lazy about checking for duplicate files. After my recent finding I had five copies of some songs, I figured it was time to do something about it. I found a handy little duplicate file finder application for Mac OS and it found a ridiculous amount of duplicate files: Over 16,000. I was tired, it was late, I hit the “Delete All Duplicate Files” button. The next day, I figured out what that meant: If there was one copy of a file, it deleted ALL identical versions of that file, including the original. Ooops. This caused me all kinds of trouble, as it deleted Omnifocus data files, some Firefox cache and config files, and of course, music files. I’ve been slowly crawling through my iTunes library bit-by-bit identifying “missing” files and using Apple’s Time Machine (glad I was using that regularly!) to restore the missing files.

At first, I didn’t see the pattern in what files were missing, as they seemed random. I’d look in a folder where iTunes has my music folder organized (by artist, then album) and wonder why two or four out of twelve files were missing. After a few file restores, I began to realize a lot of the missing songs were some of my favorites–those most likely to be copied in multiple places. Ah, naturally, the favorite songs would be the ones to get deleted. I’ve temporarily disabled my Time Machine backups so my music files don’t roll off the back end of the monthly snapshots. Hopefully I’ll be done here in a few more evenings. It’s good mindless unwinding work if nothing else.

Update (4 July 2009): I finally finished the laborious restore process last night. Many good lessons were learned.

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It’s Been A While

Wednesday, July 1st, 2009

It’s been quite some time–maybe two years or more–since this web space has held any more than a simple stub placeholder that I hacked up in about five minutes using vi directly on the web host via an SSH connection (yes, that means something to my technical readers).  After a long hiatus, I’ve decided to bring the blog back for a number of reasons:

  1. Sometimes I want to share stuff with the world at large, and I don’t always want to subject people to signing up for facebook or the social network du jour just to read what I have to say (Hi there, Uncle Bernie!)
  2. I noticed on my web log reports that people were getting referred here from twitter, so I figured I should give them something to look at beyond the “under construction” disappointment page.
  3. I hear that blogging gets you noticed by employers or something.  Sometimes this is not a good thing.  We will see.

The discerning and technical readers out there will notice that I’ve switched content management systems again.  I chose WordPress mostly because it has a iPhone app that lets me post and manage things remotely.  No kidding, that was my main decision point.  Seriously folks, if you’re not developing mobile clients for your systems, you stand to lose out.

I am considering converting my posts from back in the day (2003-2005 time frame), but that’s a project for another day and will require some SQL geekery to make the import from Geeklog to WordPress happen.

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