longform

It's been over 20 months since we had to buy gasoline, because in Sept 2024, we traded in our 12 year old Subaru Outback for a Kia EV9. The Backstory We bought the Outback in October 2012. We needed something a big…

Time is fascinating. Maybe it's because I entered the field right before Y2K, but how we've taught computers to deal with time has been an area of interest for much of my career. Over a decade ago I gave a talk at HVOpen…

One of the current challenges in the field of Journalism is that there are currently 6 PR staff for every 1 Journalist , and the PR staff are much higher paid. Which means that a lot of reporting on more technical areas…

This past week I was talking with my folks on the phone, and my mom asked a question: What climate organizations should she give to? She has typically been giving to various animal welfare organizations, but it's really…

Every year my mix of podcasts changes up a bit, and the end of the year is worth reflecting on what I've been listening to. Always on Top These podcasts I'm always jumping to the top of my queue when a new episode comes…

Over the past year and a half I've been volunteering with Citizens' Climate Lobby , a volunteer group with a laser focus on passing federal carbon pricing legislation in a bi-partisan manner. I got involved originally…

This talk by Jesse Jenkins at UPENN is one of the best looks at what doing deep decarbonization of the grid really looks like. Jenkins is a PhD candidate at MIT researching realistic paths to get our electricity sector…

This morning on NPR there was a piece with Howard Dean about how older leaders should step aside and make way for a new generation. This has popped up in politics a bunch of times over the past couple of years, as the…

I've been hosting my email over at Fastmail for years, and for the most part the service is great. The company understands privacy , contributes back to open source , and is incredibly reliable. One of the main reasons I…

This is the version of the talk I gave at API Strat back in November about OpenStack's API microversions implementation, mostly trying to frame the problem statement. The talk was only 20 minutes long, so you can only…

They are right when they say there is nothing quite like a total solar eclipse. I had seen an annular eclipse in my senior year of high school as it cross over Vermont. Wandering out there with our physics teacher,…

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Often months later something about one I listened to really strikes a chord, enough that I want to share it with others through Facebook or my blog. I'd like to quote the relevant section,…

A few days before the election, an extraordinary story popped up in hundreds of thousands of people's Facebook feeds. This story was salacious. It was vivid, filled with intriguing details. There was a photo of a burning…

Over the past couple of years we've been trying to find a path forward with the Nova API. The Nova v2.0 API defined a very small core set of interfaces that were basically unchangable and copied from Rackspace early in…

Forget the Bulb I have replaced most of the traditional lights in our house now, with a plan to purge the rest over the next couple of months. However, for new lighting in the house, I'm starting to look into LED native…

Beyond normal screw bulbs in our house, we've got a bunch of florescent tube lights. The primary lighting for the family room, workroom, and garage are tube lights, and are old enough that their flicker and hum is…

Apparently the way my fathering nesting instinct kicks in is through home improvements, as I've had a brand new motivation to plow through a ton of things while at home for paternity leave. One of the large projects has…

Note: background on lighting and motivation for this is in Part 1 . If A19 or 800 Lumens means nothing to you, I suggest you read that first. Also, all links to products go to my Amazon affiliate referral code. So if you…

Last week at LinuxCon I gave a presentation on DevStack which gave me the proper excuse to turn an idea that Dean Troyer floated a year ago about OpenStack Layers into pictures (I highly recommend reading that for…

Like a lot of others, I'm currently trying to catch my breath after the incredible OpenStack Havana release. One of they key reasons that OpenStack is able to evolve as fast as it does, and the whole thing not fall…

It turns out that we found, then lost, the cure for scurvy well before we eventually identified it as Vitamin C. There is an incredible write up of that story . Now, I had been taught in school that scurvy had been…

Over the past couple of weeks I redid the MHVLUG site as a Drupal site. Drupal is a content management system, which is a fancy way of saying it's a website, that lets you modify most of it's parts via a web interface,…

After I got my HTC Hero and purchased DoggCatcher 🔗💀 , I've now got this entirely seemless podcast experience as my phone grabs the newest stuff any time I'm on wireless. It caused me to do some trimming and tuning on…

I love git. I'll state that up front. I also love github , which I've expressed in the past . Both are making me look at software in a new way. I also think the pair of them are changing some of the rules we know for how…