Category: Stuff

It’s the Little Things

Small things make me happy.

I run a local Active Directory domain on my home network with a Samba back-end.¹ Over the past few weeks I’ve been building out a second domain controller, but I didn’t have 100% replication – it replicated AD and DNS, but not DHCP.²

After a short outage yesterday (due to an update) I decided that this had to change.  So I:

  • followed the instructions,
  • realized that the instructions were out of date,
  • figured out the correct procedure,
  • completed my setup, and
  • submitted a revision to the wiki.

It’s a small step, but I’m such a nerd that I’m riding high – one, because I’ve scratched an itch and have redundancy in my domain; and two, that I’ve visibly contributed something useful to open source (small as it may be).

¹ For along time it was powered by a single Raspberry Pi, but keeping that up to date became a struggle because it’s a little too low-powered.  But that’s all another story.

² This isn’t a completely useless situation.  It’s much easier to recover from a domain-controller crash if you still have a standing domain controller.  (A solo-domain-controller recovery is much more complicated recovery.)

Lies, and the lying liars that tell them

There are strangers in your life that you should never lie to:

Your doctor or therapist because they won’t judge you, want to make you healthier, and can only make the best treatment plan with your full cooperation.

Your lawyer because they won’t judge you and can only provide the best legal advice when they know all the facts.

Your dentist and oral hygienist because, regardless of your lies, as soon as you open your filthy mouth they know whether you’ve flossed or not.

Words to Live By

I’m copying and posting this here to remind myself, from time to time, of the message.

Well hey, here’s a valuable piece of information for you.

Most things, fairly universally, you’re wrong about. Yes, it’s true. Most of the things which you believe you’re right about – you are in fact wrong about. To some degree, either by having an incomplete picture of facts but believing you’ve got a complete one, or holding differing viewpoints and not being aware of it, or making a judgement on an incorrect assumption or even bad information you’ve received…

It’s just that most of the time the amount of your inaccuracy doesn’t matter. But accepting that fact is important because it allows room for you to accept errors in your thinking on important issues.

You’re not infallible, you’re not so great, you don’t know much. But that’s OK. Because none of us are infallible, none of us are that great, none of us know all that much.

But if you’re humble enough – you’ll keep learning. Slowly decreasing the margin of our error is all we can hope to do. If you believe you’ve fully closed it…that it’s reached 0, that you’ve finally got it all figured out and there is no more error…well then you’re just flying blind now. It may take a while, but you’ll eventually crash – as any pilot with closed eyes eventually does.

Bricka_Bracka via Reddit

 

Even if we’re in The Matrix, does it really matter?

Let teachers and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me.

“Conan the Barbarian” in the novel Queen of the Black Coast by Robert E. Howard