Thursday, January 27, 2005

Oops

I've been neglectful here lately. Life has been a little too crazy at home and work. I've also gotten into my bad habit of starting a VERY long post and not getting it out the door in a timely manner. That's coming, but I'll get something out relatively quickly.

We just had CFS come in for a meeting yesterday. We raked them over the coals for some things. I have some issues with the way they support their product. It's a little too hackerish for me. Are hackers - as in the basement coders that are classically and unkept - bad for coding projects? No. Not really. Are they really good to depend on when you're hanging in there at 4 am and the whole center is, well, down on its knees waiting for a patch? Not really. CFS are good guys. They know where their bread is buttered (not here). They do have a future as it seems they're working out their issues. Whether it arrives or not I can't say. I can say though that for them the future is not now.

My paper progresses. I've layed it out and written about a 1/4 of it, I think. I'm going to purposefully not draw conclusions. I'll do a summary instead. That way people can get an idea what matches their own multisystem file systems.

Last night I ended up getting home after my wife and found she wasn't home. I got some goof off time after I made dinner: some kasha, potato and pork soup. I thought she'd be home realtively quickly. However, I've found that when she takes off with this particular friend, she doesn't come home between 8 and 9. Next time I am going to spend that time on something a little different.

My reading of _Collapse_ continues. I have some doubts now. It seems that he has been picking out ecologically marginal habitats and pronouncing that they are good descriptors of ecologically nonmarginal ones. If he could produce an example of a society that collapsed because of ecological reasons in, say, Europe or North America (nonjungle) or some such, I'd be more willing to go along. It's not to say that some of the things he points out are things we should ignore, its just that I think his thesis hasn't been proven well as yet. Right now, I am reading about modern China. We shall see, but he's losing ground in the convincing game.


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