From Grumpy's Garage

 My family and I have been stranded in Montana for almost a week, now, waiting for repairs on our  Miles City Hotel & Suites , the nicest hotel in town. They feature an indoor pool and spa, guest laundry, a hot breakfast, and, in their words, "ultra hi-speed Wi-Fi." (Fast Internet was an important feature. As a Google engineer, I live and die on Internet access.) truck to be completed so we can finish our road trip and return home to Seattle. We've been staying at We expect our truck to be all fixed late this afternoon. As I consider our departure tomorrow morning to resume our road trip, I got to thinking about this home-away-from-home here at the hotel. I've had a few occasions to chat with Cheryl, the general manager here at the hotel. She covered the 3pm-7pm shift on the front desk this past weekend. From talking with her and the other front desk staff, I gathered that the hotel had recently given up its Holiday Inn franchise. Holiday Inn was being too picky a...

Over the last couple of days, I've noted on Facebook and Google+ that we've been having car trouble. We had to make an unscheduled stop in Montana to repair the engine after overheating and blowing head gaskets. Yesterday we checked into the nicest hotel we could find in Miles City while Deluxe Motors tracks down parts and gets the truck ready to travel again. (We chose the nicest hotel because we wanted this to feel like a detour on our vacation, not a prison sentence.) Stephanie and I just got out of the spa 45 minutes ago. While we chatted there, we took stock of our situation. We agreed that we have absolutely nothing to complain about. The radiator overheated in the most benign of places, the small town of Forsyth. While it took a couple of hours to find a repair shop that could work on the truck immediately, then arrange a tow to that shop 45 miles away, we did most of that "fingers doing the walking" from an air conditioned waiting room of a nearby tire shop in...

As my Summer Sabbatical Vacation (yes, in my mind, that's a proper noun) winds down, I cannot help but take stock: did I achieve my goals? What? Achieving goals while on vacation? Vacation is time to relax, to just enjoy the people your are with, the places you visit! You don't need no stinking goals! (Apologies to The Three Amigos.) Ah, but there's the paradox. The goal of a vacation is to have no goals. In fact, you can't even  go  on vacation without goals. 1. Pack the luggage. 2. Load the car. 3. Point the car toward your vacation spot. 4. Don't get a speeding ticket. These all start as goals, as objectives. As you achieve them, they turn into completed tasks. But I digress. Getting back to the goals of my Summer Sabbatical Vacation... I had several goals for this trip that started on July 2, 2015. Among them, to explore some of the smaller islands on the Maine coast, taking Second Wind possibly as far as Vinalhaven Island in Penobscot Bay. I started that cruise...

Mooring in Flanders Bay at the end of a cruise Stephanie and I cruised to Bar Harbor for lunch yesterday. It was a lot of effort for a burger and crab salad. We had planned to do it on Tuesday, but the sky was so gray and heavy with fog that we postponed the trip. While I enjoy sailing in almost any weather, Stephanie doesn't. We carried the kayak down to the water's edge at about 8:45, about an hour before low tide in Flanders Bay. I brought the only paddle because I wanted Stephanie to enjoy the cruise and let me do the work. A light breeze blew from the west as we paddled out to Second Wind. Getting the boat ready to sail was a comedy of minor errors. I forgot to lower the kick-up rudder while I was still in the kayak, when it is easier to do. Tying a slippery hitch onto the mooring was harder than it should have been. I forgot to unhook the boom end from the backstay before raising the mainsail. But we got it figured out an...

1em; text-align: right;"> margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"> Second Wind (on the right), moored near the neighbors' boats in Flanders Bay, Sullivan, Maine Yes, this looks just like Seattle weather. I had considered taking Stephanie on a day cruise over to Bar Harbor for lunch today. But the skies are a thick gray blanket, a high fog that sometimes comes down to touch the water. Not a good day for sailing with my sunshine-loving bride. Instead, I'll work on a few boat projects that have been waiting for my attention. While the winds are relatively calm this morning, I can experiment with the new reefing points I had installed on the Genoa jib. I'd like to see what I can do to reef the Genoa from the cockpit. (By the way, I highly recommend The Sailor's Sketchbook, by Bruce Bingham . It's full of great ideas. I once was browsing through it with a three-year-old in my lap. I had him ...

Sailing Flanders Bay After over a week of admiring Second Windat anchor (which I rather enjoyed) I finally got the opportunity last Friday to take her out for a few hours of sailing on Flanders Bay. Why did I wait for over a week? Each day had a different reason. Weather was a common issue. Sometimes there was no wind. Sometimes is there was too much or it was raining. I wanted to enjoy my first cruise on the bay. Yes, that makes me a "fair weather sailor." Ya wanna make somethin' of it? Other days had errands to run: visiting family in Bangor, visiting a doctor near Portland, or getting the trailer wheels fixed. Sometimes, I just wanted to enjoy the quiet solitude of the day with a book or my journal. Yes, I could have solitude on Second Wind, but, unless she is lying at anchor, it wouldn't be quiet. When she is under way, she demands attention, even with the autopilot doing the steering. I must keep a lookout f...

It's been a full week, the first week of my Summer Sabbatical. We left Brier, Second Wind in tow, last Thursday, July 2, at about 11am, a little later than we had planned. The drive across Montana, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and Minnesota were without incident, and I found it remarkable how much the Michigan upper peninsula looked like the coast of Maine. (I had considered waking up Stephanie and saying, "Look, Honey. We made it!") On Day Three of this road trip, we crossed into Ontario with the goal of making it past Montreal before stopping to rest. But it was not to be. About halfway to Montreal, traffic on the Trans Canada Highway started to slow down. As I looked into my rear view mirror to verify that the traffic behind me was also slowing down, I noticed that the boat trailer was rocking. What I had thought was bumpy pavement was this rocking trailer. I could feel it in the steering wheel. A check in my right side mirror confirmed: tire failure. I pulled off onto th...

Yup. I've been neglecting my blog. Mea culpa. I've been keeping myself (too) busy lately, mostly with volunteer projects. Just this spring, I have worked on: Soloprenerds Helping Bethany Mooradian, solo-entrepreneur extraordinaire, build a community website (still in development) full of useful resources for micro-enterprises. Center for Wooden Boats Conducting an afternoon class for other CWB volunteers to qualify them for crew duties aboard the sharpie Colleen Wagner when she is used for Cast OFF! Free Public Sail cruises. Emergency Services Coordinating Agency (Amateur Radio ) With my local RACES group, preparing for the next disaster. I've participated in a half-day drill plus joined the many volunteers to support the Oso Mudslide remembrance ceremony . Then there are regular group meetings and training. It's easy to sucked in farther than intended. City Council Meetings Participating in discussions; I live a mere eight-minute walk from City Hall. In my family, it...

It's been a busy and remarkably productive month. I spent the first two weeks sprinting to the finish line preparing to deliver a tutorial, Playing in the Clouds , at the Cascadia IT Conference . That went well. Then I had to attend to a few items that I had ignored for those two weeks: steering toward the next milestone of a WordPress site I am helping to build preparing to lead a troubleshooting/brainstorming workshop,  WordPress Round Table , for WordPress site owners writing profiles of Makers (creative folks making cool things in their spare time) that use Google's Makerspace in Seattle. The last two items had deadlines yesterday, and came off without a hitch. The first item is on schedule for its progress status and planning meeting next week. Oh, yeah. Then there is my day job: tech support for Google Cloud Platform . That is going pretty well, too. But today, I'm taking a break. I slept in until 6am, and it felt luxurious. I spent a full hour at the gym instea...

"Consumer". I hate that label. I am a producer. I produce value. People pay me to produce value. In general, I produce a lot more value than the value that I consume. You probably produce value, too. Whether you work for a company, a government, or are self-employed. The only reason you get a paycheck is because you produce value to your customers or your employer. If you don't produce value, if you are NOT a producer, then resign yourself to your role as a consumer. Don't go to work tomorrow. If you do, might violate the first law of consumerism, "Buy early! Buy often!" Just sit in front of the TV and eat Bon Bons, like a good consumer should.

It's getting down to the wire. Next week, Friday, March 13, I'll be leading a workshop (a "tutorial", they call it) at the Cascadia IT Conference to introduce system administrators to some elements of cloud computing. I expect that there will be several in the workshop who have experimented with virtual machines on AWS or Google Cloud Platform. My workshop will take that experimentation to the next level: making a website scalable. I call it the "Good Morning, America" scenario. It's 4:30 AM, Pacific Time. You are peacefully entering another cycle of REM sleep. You can sleep peacefully because your web servers are monitored. And the monitoring software with page you at any hour if the site goes down. Then it happens. George or Amy start chatting about the cool downloads on your company's site that are available only to registered users. But registration is free. At the commercial break, 7:37 AM, New York Time, 217,243 people try to register at your ...

I recently finished Chapter 3 in Lean Analytics . In it, the authors discuss "analytical frameworks", which I take as merely, "How do we talk about relevant metrics?" One of those frameworks is the Lean Canvas. In it, between the Unique Value Proposition and the Customer Segments, is "Unfair Advantage". Unfair. Like patents, brand equity, and other barriers to entry for competition. But "unfair"? I don't buy it. Those are competitive advantages, to be sure, but none of them are "unfair". It's like they don't believe in a competitive marketplace or something.

I managed to get out last night and visit the Tech It Easy WordPress meetup group. I've not gotten far enough into my deep dive into WordPress to be terribly concerned about security issues. I was glad to learn that I was already most things right. Part of the meeting got to talking about how to set strong passwords. My favorite password algorithm is to pick a poem, lyrics from a song, or famous passage of literature and adapt that to a password. For example, consider the nursery rhyme, "Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb; Mary had a little lamb, it's fleece was white as snow."  That could easily parse into a few passwords. Here are a couple: Mhall,*3; or Mhall1fwwas. Both of these are at least eight characters in mixed case and contain numbers and punctuation. (Of course, everyone who reads this page will know these passwords, so you probably should not use them.) Most importantly, you wont find them in any dictionary, so they are not subject to a brute...

If a bunch of  networks are going to be connected , they have to agree on how to talk to one another. They agree on a common set of network "protocols" to exchange email, transfer files, even to emulate telephones. A protocol is just a standardized way to talk. When your phone rings, you pick it up and say, "Hello?" I might respond with "Hi, this Brian. Is now a good time to talk about next week's meeting?" And the conversation continues. When it's over, polite "telephone protocol" requires that we each say, "good bye", then hang up and close the connection. Sending letters in the mail uses a couple of protocols. You remember writing letters, don't you? You get out a piece of paper and write the date at the top of the page, then, if it's an official letter, you add your return address, the name and address of the recipient, and a polite salutation. "Dear Mr. Smith, I'm writing to tell you how pleased I am that y...

Image credit: Google Gemini Failure Is Not an Option; It’s Required To be presented at the Cascadia IT Conference , Seattle, WA, March 7-8, 2014  (55 minutes) Abstract Google SREs (system reliability engineers) spend almost 90% of their time handling or anticipating failure 1 . Managing failure is at the core of keeping Google services as reliable as they are. In this workshop, we will explore some of the principles Google employs to make services reliable and how you might use them in your work. Everything fails. With a little planning, you can fail well. Shorter Summary A workshop to explore some ways that Google SRE makes Google as reliable as it is, and how you can make your services more reliable, too, with a focus on failing well. More About Me Brian Haney has been a system administrator and SRE systems engineer for seven years. When not writing, speaking or teaching, he helps maintain some of Google’s internal storage infrastructure. Notes: 1: I posit this without comprehens...

"The Cloud" is an overloaded term. In tech-speak, "overloaded" means that people use the same term to mean different things. Computer geeks like to connect computers to each other and make them talk to each other in electronic ones and zeros, making a computer "network".  Some computers on the network might have special jobs, like listening for incoming email messages or accepting requests to download any new messages. A file server is a place to copy files to or from.  A web server is just a file server that listens for requests, usually from anywhere and in a certain protocol. Those files are in a particular format, like hypertext markup language (HTML), and often have references to other files also on the web server, like images and videos. You might have special devices on your network, like security cameras, web TVs, or wi-fi access radios. Somewhere, your network has a box that is also connected to the Internet, your Internet "router". A ro...

Last week I started listening to the audio book, Guerilla Marketing for the Home-Based Business . At the gym, I got as far as the chapter Direct Mail. I hate junk mail. I expected that chapter to be completely worthless. I was wrong. I Guerilla Marketer doesn't use direct mail to mean mass mailings. The Guerilla Marketer can fine tune their target mailing list to zoom in on key prospects. What's more, since you're not mailing to millions "OCCUPANTs", you can invest more in your message and presentation and even go so far as to make each direct mail piece a little more customized than just the mailing label and salutation. I found myself brainstorming about what value-added content I could fit onto an 8-1/2" x 11" three-panel brochure. A cheat sheet of the most important WordPress command? Wait. No, that won't work. WordPress doesn't have a command line. A checklist that every webmaster should go through every week? That sounds reasonable. Those p...