Chris Dwan

Category: Uncategorized

  • Tibet

    From my favorite political cartoonist:

    Incidentally, for a glimpse of what Americans sound like when they’re defending the Iraq war before the rest of the world, peer in at some of the online comments on the riots in Tibet by Chinese: the Tibetans are barbarians, they should be grateful to the Chinese for being there, the Chinese put an end to all sorts of atrocities, offered them economic development, built schools, etc. (Again with the schools. You’d think that the great imperial powers of the world were fanatics for education, some sort of heavily armed truant board or PTA, invading ignorant hooky-playing nations and forcibly building schools out of the stern, well-intentioned kindness of their hearts.) All of which sidesteps the issue that it’s not their fucking country. I remember once talking to a Chinese political cartoonist, a bright, erudite, cosmopolitan woman, who nevertheless, on the subject of Tibet, innocently parroted the party line: well, they were invited there, Tibet was really very backward before the Chinese came, they were helping to develop the area, the Tibetans should be grateful to them. It was creepy. Replace Chinese with Americans and Tibet with Iraq and tell me whether this doesn’t start to sound familiar.

    Naturally he’s completely wrong about all of this. We’re nothing like the Chinese.

    But it *does* kinda sound the same, doesn’t it?

  • Obama

    For the first time in my adult life, I think that I actually support a candidate.

    Here’s a link to the full text.

    this got long …

  • Party

    I was at a really nice party with medyani, fanw, and friends on Saturday. It was almost nothing like this one:

  • If a crane falls in Manhattan, does it make a sound?

    A 20 story tall construction crane fell in Manhattan today, killing four and destroying one building.

    There was a bar located in that building.

    The name of the bar? “Fubar.”

  • Tibet

    I know that most of you folks follow the news, so you know that there is currently some bad stuff going on inside the increasingly Chinese province formerly known as Tibet. I may have a bit more news than some, through involvement in the Save Tibet movement:

    click if you’re interested in my thoughts, otherwise just move on

  • 23 and me continues to be late.

    Dear FDMTS,

    We wanted to acknowledge that you've been waiting longer than anticipated to receive your data from 23andMe. Our sincerest apologies for the delay; the laboratory analysis process typically takes 4-6 weeks, but we are experiencing a backlog that is resulting in longer than predicted processing times - up to about 10 weeks. We have taken several steps to expand our laboratory capacity and the efforts are yielding results now. You will be notified via email in the next few weeks as soon as your data are ready.

    We've recently added new content to our Personal Genome Service that we hope you'll enjoy. Thanks so much for your patience and for choosing to join the growing 23andMe community.

    Sincerely,
    The 23andMe Team

    Or, more loosely, “you weren’t at Davos, so you’re trivial to us.”

    I grow less enthralled.

  • Good day

    Today was pretty good. We had an Apple engineer onsite, and everyone learned something.

    We rebuilt a 30TB SAN to make it faster, and we rebuilt a 40TB SAN to make it more reliable. We made a plan for the 50 and 60TB installs, when we can get a maintenance window on them. I specced out 4TB of insanely high availability storage with a disk to disk to tape backup scheme.

    After lunch, I stripped the canvas top off the Jeep Wrangler that Hertz rented to me for the week, and we semi-kinda bluffed our way onto the air force base to ogle the F-22s. One of them blasted off basically right over our (exposed) heads. Kids in a candy store, I tell you.

    Tomorrow, I go home.

  • My day at work

    All my travel plans worked out great. Saw sacredangle‘s junior guitar recital, which was stunningly awesome, and got to hang out with the whole extended fam as well. Conversations were happening in at least three languages at the after party. I felt privileged to be there.

    Late in the evening, justkidding_nr shared some of her compositions, including “Don’t Fuck Around When you Choose a Major,” and “Stop Playing With Your Wii”. Pure genius.

    Afterwards, I drove to Richmond with my dad and secured a rental car for the run to Norfolk. I had been unaware until that point that Hertz rents the Jeep Wrangler. It’s a vaguely MASH looking cloth-top. Somewhat fun to drive, I guess technically it’s a convertible, and not at all what I was expecting. Wheee!

    Since I had a little extra time, I drove out and went across the 17 mile long Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. I dig bridges. This one was super awesome, since it also includes TWO underwater tunnels.

    On the way in to work this morning, I drove UNDER a pair of jets doing touch and go landings. It’s days like this that make me really love what I do and where I do it.

  • Nerd girls

    As usual, jwz says it best when he says almost nothing.

    Wow.

  • Test

    I passed. Got the certificate and everything. The only mishap was my own dumb fault, when I got kicked in the fingers. If I had, for example, been making a fist like they tell you on day one, I wouldn’t have four kinda-sorta-jammed fingers now. All things considered, a small price to pay.

    Also lots of joy on the shins. Shin bruises are totally fair though, because whatever you’ve got, you know the other guy has too.

    Then, as I was settling into a well deserved dinner, around 5:30, Southwest Airlines called to tell me that my 7:30pm flight was delayed to 11:30. However, if I could make it to the 5:45 flight, that one was delayed until 6:30 and I had a space on it.

    I abandoned the dinner and hauled ass. I made it, and am now posting from the gate, watching the “A” group board.

    Who is the fastest? I am the fastest!