I’ve been spending some time on Facebook recently, and today I changed my status to “Ben was happier when all we had to worry about was the Russians nuking us.” I meant it as an off-hand remark, but the more I think about it, the more it sort of sums up how I feel now.
I grew up during the waning years of the USSR - back when the thought of a nuclear attack was still a concern, but much less likely. America was strong - nobody was really a threat to us, and those who were a threat (the Iran hostage crisis) weren’t really something that everybody worried about. The economy was booming - except for the S&L failure, which didn’t seem to affect my seven year old self or my family at all. The only thing that I noticed from that was that a former bank branch became a Chinese restaurant.
9/11 happened, and the economy slowed. I got laid off from VPI and spent the remainder of the summer and fall in an alcoholic haze with Jay, not doing much besides sending resumes, surfing Monster, and playing paintball in the woods on Fischer Boulevard behind Mugsys. There was the threat of the “next attack on American soil” which sort of hung over like a specter, but even then did not really keep me up at night. I suppose that, had I lived or worked in New York in September of 2001, or had I known anybody who died in the WTC attacks I might have felt differently.
Seven years later there’s still the threat that terrorists pose. We also have Iran which may or may not be building a nuclear device which certainly would be used to attack America. The news today is that North Korea is taking the seals off their reactors and that they don’t care about being labeled a state that supports terrorism. It’s either a negotiating point or another vector of attack for people who don’t like America.
The headlines are all screaming about the economy. Giant banks - the pillars of the American economy - are teetering near collapse. AIG was just bailed out. There’s a $700B plan stalled in Congress to “rescue” the economy that is being drawn up by the same people (Republicans and Democrats) who were incompetent enough to let the country get to this point. My house has lost $50K in equity in the last year. Record numbers of houses are being foreclosed on. Record numbers of people (myself included) are one or two paychecks away from disaster. One of my friends who works construction has been out of a job for a month. There’s the ever present worry that the layoff I had in 2001 will repeat itself in 2008, and I’ll be scrambling to find some way to keep my head above water and pay the $1600/mo or something needed for COBRA.
My daughter is two and a half. She wakes up innocently each day, heads into the living room to play with her toys and watch cartoons. She knows nothing about the people in the world who wouldn’t think twice about blowing her up with a car bomb to make a political statement. She knows nothing about the impending collapse of the economy, the lowering value of the house, or the rising prices of groceries.
I have to wonder if the world is getting more complicated (and dangerous), or if my perception of all of the bad things going on is just increasing as I get older. There hasn’t been a day that goes by in the last two weeks that I haven’t worried about the future - the collapse of the economy, and the very real threat that myself and my family could be homeless and standing on a soup kitchen line with hundreds of other people. I don’t know if I can blame the situation in the world on Bush (which would be a convenient label to stick on everything) or if it’s just the inevitable conclusion of the way things have been headed for generations and generations.
All that I know is that I am terrified of the future.
Tags: economy
Today I finally managed to get RHEL5 boxes authenticating against Active Directory using secure LDAP. I had no problem getting RHEL4 boxes to do it, or RHEL5 boxes without TLS, but I figured out what the problem was with RHEL5. In my /etc/ldap.conf I had a line:
ssl yes
Which enabled Secure LDAP in RHEL4. In RHEL5 the line needs to be:
ssl start_tls
Incidentally, that line works fine in RHEL4, which means that I can continue using the same config files (and eventually package them up as an RPM or something for when we provision new nodes) across RHEL4 and RHEL5 systems.
Beyond that Chris managed to get two Itanium HPUX servers racked and their console cards configured. He had a nice introduction to Wireshark to get their MAC address, and then arp ping to configure the IP’s. Tomorrow I will work with him to get the VLANs set correctly on the switch uplinks, and then I will have to do something to jog my memory to disable Serviceguard on those two nodes.
Tags: LDAP
Saturday I took a ride up to Holmdel to see the first Concours d’Elegance (a car show full of meticulously restored pre-1960’s cars). The event was held at Hop Brook Farm, which is right next to my old company’s headquarters. After being away from there for nearly 8 years, it was nice to be back.
They expected (and got) a lot of attendees, so Vonage let them use their parking lots for visitor parking. Vonage’s headquarters are in the old Prudential building on Holmdel Road. It’s on a huge piece of property. Driving in I noticed that they had a softball field to the right, and walking across to get to the event I walked through their soccer field. I’ve worked in startups before, but none of them had so much as a foozball table, let alone a softball or soccer field. The HQ of Vonage seemed very slick from what I saw. I can only imagine what their infrastructure is like. From what I understand, it’s very Solaris heavy.
Anyway, the event was really nice. Highlights were an 1887 Benz Motor-Wagen, recognized as one of the first “cars.” There was also a 1955 Mercedes Gull-Wing, a $500k+ car which I never thought I’d see in person, and a beautiful jet black Buick Lesabre. My first car was a 1969 Buick Skylark, and there’s not quite anything like the classic car smell that some of these things pick up. It’s sort of like the smell that Jaguars or Porsche’s have — something very unique to them.
You can see all of the pics in my gallery, but here’s a quick taste:
Tags: cars