the frig blig

Geov Parrish reports in the June 25 issue of Eat The State that former KIRO-TV news anchor and current King County Executive candidate Susan Hutchison is not only a creationist — but she served on the Board of Directors of local “think tank” Discovery Institute. And he also reports that this information was removed from her website once she announced her candidacy.

Pass it on. This fact deserves widespread knowledge, fast.

Some interesting music has come my way lately.

Iran’s CD Dissolver is great — I can’t get enough of it. I hadn’t heard of this NY-based band until they were booked at a recent KEXP concert.

Speaking of NY bands, I first ran into Gogol Bordello while visiting a friend in Tallahassee last December but didn’t get around to listening to his tunes until now. Very funny, lively and a little crazy!

And for something completely different — 70’s Texas tunesmith Townes Van Zandt died in 1997 but not before writing lots of classic songs made famous by other bands’s covers (e.g. ‘If I Needed You’, ‘Pancho and Lefty’, and ‘Who Do You Love’). Country musician Steve Earle recently released an album of Van Zandt covers, which prompted me to listen to the original again in the form of the double CD Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas recorded in 1973 but not released until 1977. Some mighty fine songs, yup.

Strange Maps

I’m trying to understand why the U.S. finds it “unacceptable” (Secretary of State Clinton as quoted by the BBC) for North Korea to develop nuclear weapons, when the U.S. itself has literally thousands of nuclear weapons ready to launch at a moment’s notice. If it’s good enough for America, why shouldn’t the Koreans — or any other country — have the same opportunity to play with nukes? I mean, if you examine the historical record, the U.S. has invaded more countries than North Korea, and AFAIK the U.S. is the only country to have actually used nukes against another country. So arguably we’re the more dangerous country. The moral high ground Clinton sounds like she thinks she’s standing on is fairly blood-soaked.

Add an entry to /etc/email-addresses. Thank you Martin Geisler!

Was present at the most excellent performance of Sunship at Res Audio. One of the cooler moments of my year to date.

This is an automated email sent from Dell Chat. The following information is a log of your session. Please save the log for your records.
Your session ID for this incident is xxxxxxxx.
Time Details
05/26/2009 05:48:19PM System: “Thank you for choosing Chat support. The next representative will be available to assist you shortly. While waiting, check some of our self support options above. No fear, you won’t lose your place in line!”
05/26/2009 05:51:48PM Session Started with Agent (AES Lance M)
05/26/2009 05:51:51PM Agent (AES Lance M): “Hello, thank you for contacting Dell’s Enterprise Chat Support. My name is AES Lance M. Once the chat session is completed, a transcript will be sent to <your email address>.

Please give me 2 to 3 minutes to access your system details and contact information.”
05/26/2009 05:53:15PM Agent (AES Lance M): “How can I help you today? Please include as much information as possible, such as the operating system, error messages or symptoms, if this system is part of a SAN or Cluster and any troubleshooting steps that may have been taken up to this point.”
05/26/2009 05:54:03PM frank brown: “I installed a second dual-port NIC in this PE2950 to connect to an MD3000i. How do I configure the NIC ports on vmware ESX 3.5?”
05/26/2009 05:54:29PM Agent (AES Lance M): “We don’t support MD3000is here.”
05/26/2009 05:54:42PM Agent (AES Lance M): “I would not know that information, you used a server tag to get there.”
05/26/2009 05:54:55PM Agent (AES Lance M): “an MD3000 would not have allowed you into this dept.”
05/26/2009 05:54:59PM frank brown: “Huh? I’m asking about configuring the NIC in the PE2950.”
05/26/2009 05:55:17PM frank brown: “The 2950 is running vmware.”
05/26/2009 05:55:24PM Agent (AES Lance M): “ok, I dont know how to configure NIC to work with an MD3000.”
05/26/2009 05:55:26PM frank brown: “How do I set the IP addresses on the NIC?”
05/26/2009 05:55:38PM frank brown: “Don’t worry about the MD300i. It doesn’t matter.”
05/26/2009 05:55:46PM Agent (AES Lance M): “that is done in storage support.”
05/26/2009 05:55:59PM frank brown: “I know what IP addresses I need to set the ports to.”
05/26/2009 05:56:17PM frank brown: “Just need to know how to do it under vmware ESX (purchased from Dell w this server).”
05/26/2009 05:56:22PM Agent (AES Lance M): “Ok, please standby while I escalate to storage with VMware, they will likely ask you to call storage as well.”
05/26/2009 05:56:34PM frank brown: “This has nothing to do with storage.”
05/26/2009 05:56:40PM Agent (AES Lance M): “Its going to be a few minutes to call me back, please wait.”
05/26/2009 05:56:49PM frank brown: “This is a network adapter question.”
05/26/2009 05:57:09PM Agent (AES Lance M): “Ok, but what what are you connecting the eh NIC to?”
05/26/2009 05:57:36PM Agent (AES Lance M): “Because we dont do anything at all with outside storage for any device in this dept…because we are not trained in it.”
05/26/2009 05:57:53PM Agent (AES Lance M): “but please standby while I contact that dept and see what they say.”
05/26/2009 05:58:03PM Agent (AES Lance M): “Its going to be a few minutes.”
05/26/2009 05:58:05PM frank brown: “The NIC is connecting to a Cisco switch.”
05/26/2009 05:58:30PM frank brown: “Knock yourself out.”
05/26/2009 05:58:32PM Agent (AES Lance M): “and that is something we dont do here…no configuration of such devices in this dept.”
05/26/2009 05:58:49PM frank brown: “Dell server support doesn’t configure NICs eh?”
05/26/2009 05:58:49PM Agent (AES Lance M): “and likely, they will tell you to call in…so just an FYI.”
05/26/2009 05:58:59PM frank brown: “Very interesting.”
05/26/2009 05:59:14PM Agent (AES Lance M): “we dont support connection to external devices in this dept.”
05/26/2009 05:59:28PM frank brown: “A network switch is considered an external device ?”
05/26/2009 05:59:37PM Agent (AES Lance M): “with VMware…and its also considred consultation work, which is billable.”
05/26/2009 05:59:41PM frank brown: “What do the NIC connections you support connect to?”
05/26/2009 05:59:54PM Agent (AES Lance M): “Please standby and I will contact them.”
05/26/2009 06:02:11PM Agent (AES Lance M): “not MD3000s with any OS.”
05/26/2009 06:02:22PM Agent (AES Lance M): “no external devices of any kind here.”
05/26/2009 06:03:12PM frank brown: “Hey Lance, what does AES stand for?”
05/26/2009 06:03:40PM Agent (AES Lance M): “Americas Enterprise Support.”
05/26/2009 06:03:54PM frank brown: “Are you in Texas?”
05/26/2009 06:04:14PM Agent (AES Lance M): “yes, I am.”
05/26/2009 06:05:37PM frank brown: “Are you done with this call?”
05/26/2009 06:06:30PM frank brown: “”We don’t support NICs that connect to external devices” — that’s your final answer?”
05/26/2009 06:07:24PM Agent (AES Lance M): “no, I’m escalating…so you will know the support policy here and you can get the answer to your issue when I contact them.”
05/26/2009 06:07:34PM frank brown: “OK thx”
05/26/2009 06:07:45PM Agent (AES Lance M): “I will be more than happy to conference with a manager right now.”
05/26/2009 06:08:23PM frank brown: “I’ll discuss w anyone if I can get information.”
05/26/2009 06:08:43PM Agent (AES Lance M): “but other than that, I have to go through a process to escalate to higher software support, which is going to take me some time before I get their answer.”
05/26/2009 06:09:16PM frank brown: “I thought this was a hardware question.”
05/26/2009 06:09:23PM Agent (AES Lance M): “but I’m pretty sure I know that answer.”
05/26/2009 06:09:34PM frank brown: “But actually it’s OS support”
05/26/2009 06:09:49PM frank brown: “OS purchased from Dell on a Dell server under warranty.”
05/26/2009 06:10:10PM Agent (AES Lance M): “the MD3000 is a very complicated piece of hardware that requires a lot of configuration…this is the reason we dont take here. And that applies to the server too.”
05/26/2009 06:10:29PM frank brown: “OK I won’t connect it to the MD3000.”
05/26/2009 06:10:30PM Agent (AES Lance M): “I understand, this is why I am escalating.”
05/26/2009 06:10:38PM frank brown: “I will connect it to nothing.”
05/26/2009 06:10:40PM Agent (AES Lance M): “But I still have to escalate.”
05/26/2009 06:10:46PM frank brown: “I still want to know how to set the IP addresses.”
05/26/2009 06:11:32PM Agent (AES Lance M): “ok, and that would be considered consultation work, which is billable…so I still have to go through the same department.”
05/26/2009 06:11:58PM frank brown: “Oh never mind, clearly you’re no help.”

Cozy in the metro 16 on my way to work this morn I gave a first listen to Dark Night of the Soul. Was tickled to hear a guy singing ‘Sucking on my angel’s heart,’ only to realize several choruses later he was really saying ‘plucking on my angel’s harp’.

Darn. If Frank had spent a little more time on that tune maybe he could have reached ’sucking on my angel’s heart’, obviously superior.

Which segs into all the creative lyric twistings we’ve known over the years. A couple I recall off the top of my head:

‘Every time she goes away, she takes a piece of meat with her.’

‘Got a Black Magic Marker’

Submit your favs please?

OK so Windows 2008 isn’t the newest OS on the block, but I’m still learning it so here’s this morning’s lesson.

I installed nsclient++ 0.3.5 on a Win 2008 server, added it to nagios config files specifying various check_nt! services and restarted nagios. Nagios reported the host was DOWN and the services were unreachable due to socket failures.

On the server itself, no icon appeared in the system tray.

These problems turned out to be unrelated.

It turns out that Windows 2008’s firewall was blocking not only nagios’s default port, but (surprise!) the ECHO ICMP port as well. Once I unblocked those ports nagios’s display for this host turned green.

To get the icon in the system tray, I followed the (scary) advice in the nsclient++ FAQ for “modern windows”, editing the .ini file by commenting out sysTray.dll and adding shared_session=1.

Thank you and good night.

Yesterday’s New York Times ‘Week in Review’ section features a front-page, top-of-the-fold story by Philip Taubman called The Trouble With Zero about the nuclear disarmament movement. On first read it appears like a straightforward-enough status report on that subject. But turning to the story’s continuation on page 4 I was immediately struck by the accompanying photograph — a picture of the ‘Fat Man’ bomb from 1945 ironically captioned ‘New Weapon’!

Why did the editor select a photo of a nuclear warhead over fifty years old, when there are thousands of more modern weapons in the U.S. arsenal? Photos are not hard to find — here’s one of the B61, a light weight, intermediate yield bomb with variable yield options, of which the U.S. has several hundred stockpiled. Or this one of the newer W87 intermediate yield strategic ICBM MIRV warhead. Or the beautiful photograph of neutron pulse tubes for the W76 undergoing testing at Sandia National Laboratories (which I’m using to illustrate this blog entry).

I can only guess that the editor’s motive in selecting an ancient history nuke instead of a contemporary one is to lull the reader into complacency, by portraying nukes as quaint and old rather than presenting a picture of current reality; viz. scores of thousands of modern high-tech weapons of much greater megatonage deployed in U.S. silos and submarines, ready to be used on command.