Author: luken7

An avid and passionate sailor, drummer and technologist. My career focuses around computing and storage technologies. My passion is sailing and playing drums. I love music, especially progressive jazz and rock.

In Venezuela, we couldn’t stop Chávez. Don’t make the same mistakes we did.

Posted on by luken7

A great article and the best read of the week.

“Donald Trump is an avowed capitalist; Hugo Chávez was a socialist with communist dreams. One builds skyscrapers, the other expropriated them. But politics is only one-half policy: The other, darker half is rhetoric. Sometimes the rhetoric takes over. Such has been our lot in Venezuela for the past two decades — and such is yours now, Americans. Because in one regard, Trump and Chávez are identical. They are both masters of populism.

The recipe for populism is universal. Find a wound common to many, find someone to blame for it, and make up a good story to tell. Mix it all together. Tell the wounded you know how they feel. That you found the bad guys. Label them: the minorities, the politicians, the businessmen. Caricature them. As vermin, evil masterminds, haters and losers, you name it. Then paint yourself as the savior. Capture the people’s imagination. Forget about policies and plans, just enrapture them with a tale. One that starts with anger and ends in vengeance. A vengeance they can participate in.”

Link to the full article below, How to let a populist beat you, over and over again.

Source: In Venezuela, we couldn’t stop Chávez. Don’t make the same mistakes we did. – The Washington Post

MacBook Pro in total Beast Mode

Posted on by luken7

I usually leave programs running for several days at a time or never shut them down till something happens. For some reason, I went into Mission Control and Bam! talk about busy.. Macs just handle workloads gracefully. Six screens all running…..stuff….and six VMs. A windows laptop would have literally exploded by now.

Beast Mode

Fiber is Up

Posted on by luken7

First off, I want to thank Time Warner Cable for pushing me to another provider. My plans were to wait for Google Fiber, wasn’t even considering AT&T even though they had just run fiber through the neighborhood. Last month, TWC raised our bill from $80 to $100 for 300Mb down/20Mb up. So based on recommendations of friends in ATL and Austin/SAN, we’re giving AT&T a chance.

I have to say, I was really impressed with the knowledge, experience and professionalism of the installation tech. Definitely not a TWC contractor, that’s for sure. Overall, it took about four hours with just a “minor” challenge of running the fiber through parts of the basement, snaked around some corners and into the IDF room. Yup, I said IDF room 😉 We had to do that because I, along with the builder of the home, didn’t take into consideration that I’d run fiber someday and the existing contuits and chases wasn’t going to work.

When the tech arrived and started to explain what he was going to do, I mentioned that I have a background in telco IT, and he immediately switched into our tech language. Nice little chat about wavelengths and just how much bandwidth I could really get with the right equipment, say a Broadcom ASICs powering a pair of 25Gb optics. Hmmm…

But anyway, the installation is done, it’s up and running and the bandwidth is great. 1Gb symmtrical. The real benefit here is the upload speed. Backups of datasets to Crashplan won’t take months now with a fraction of using a 20Mb upload. Also, connecting to my Plex media server and AirVideo instally connects over mobile and streams start instantly. I could get used to this. Next up is fulltime replication to the cloud.

Having flashbacks right now of downloading IBM fixpacks for OS/2, on 21 floppy disks over a 28.8k modem. Just go to bed and in the morning, hope the line didn’t disconnect. Now…? I’m thinking about throughing a TWC liberation party, inviting friends over with their laptops, open the guest network and have a download festival.

BTW, Amazon charges $59 a year for UNLIMITED storage on CloudDrive.

Challenge accepted……

 

Oh…and bye-bye TWC…

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Apple DongleGate

Posted on by luken7

Yup, the uproar over dongle-gate. With only USB Type-C connections on the new MBP, be prepared to throw some spare change to the dongles. I wonder if Apple will come out with a separate, all white dongle accessory bag to carry all of these.

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On a good note, should be another two weeks before shipping, almost here. Hopefully will have it by birthday time, I love buying myself gifts. What’s that saying, go big or go home? Figured I’d max it out because this could very well be my last laptop (yeah right).

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Looks like Early Voting in NC is a Record Setter

Posted on by luken7

….and wow what a turnout. I had to leave because I didn’t have that much time so I’ll go back either in the morning or early next week. Barely found a parking spot at the Avery Street voting station. Walking towards the building, I asked: “that can’t possibly be the line”. Yup, it was. Wrapped around the building then zigzagging throughout the parking lot. Had to be hundreds. I guess last nights debate brought people out in drives, but for who? We’ll soon find out.