Online Identity and Vanity

Now I'll admit when you consider just how vast the Internet is, I think a lot of people (yours truly included) love the idea that with a single net-presence you can become known by a dizzying array of people.

While the idea is great if you're the attention seeking type, it does lead to some pretty unusual behavior. MySpace is perhaps the most widely known example of how the blog craze has brought some of humanity's less than admirable traits to the forefront. MySpace.com isn't a bad thing in and of itself, very few things ever are if you ask me, but what happens when you put a friends counter onto a blog? Suddenly everything is about how many friends you have. When did friendship become the Pokemon of the blogsphere? Are we so obsessed with quantity that it doesn't matter how well you know someone in so long as they can be counted as +1 to your list?

I actually view myself as being a fair unsociable person but when I do choose to add someone as a friend, and allow that list to be viewed I'd like to think that there's at least _something_ good about the person. While certainly I think it's great that so many people are beginning to 'connect' this way I'm still a little more pragmatic, I don't care if I have 1 friend or 1 billion friends, to me its how well I know that friend and the kind of person I know/feel them to be.

OK promise funnier stuff soon... REAL soon. I think.

Review: Chevy HHR

So Thursday I got to fly out to Maui to get a few installations in. Interestingly enough I found the TSA staff and checkpoints to be about the same as they normally have been.

The only downside though was my short experience having to drive around a brown Chevy HHR. The car itself is sort of a cross between a sedan, a mini-SUV and a hatchback. The closest parallel is the same basic shape of the Dodge Charger. However, the HHR suffers from a little bit of an identity crisis. With a relatively weak engine (140ish HP), a fairly small trunk (unless you drop the rear seats) and fairly loose feeling steering the HHR isn't really a performance vehicle or a great people mover. I found the engine response lacking and steering felt muddy. Feedback from the car wasn't what I was expecting and I often couldn't get a good feel for just how much sway and turning ability I was actually getting out of the car.

In the end the HHR is aptly named because "hhrrrr" is the noise you'll be making as you approach hills. Driving the HHR made me realize how much easier the Malibu Max and Chevy Cobalt were to drive. If you're an HHR owner I hope you don't take offense, but since the renta-car companies usually stock the bargain basement models, my experience with the HHR wasn't the most pleasant.

Ubuntu or Red Hat, who takes it?!

Who's distro will reign supreme. Well there's a lot of leeway there. Ubuntu is certainly the front runner in terms of popular opinion, but if you look at things from the perspective of the business owner I think you'll see that Red Hat, though having lost street cred is still a more appealing platform choice overall than Ubuntu.

While both distributions are pretty user friendly, even I can acknowledge that RH has lost a lot ground. While my RHEL 4WS install is definately stable, there's elements to it that have made porting in older apps more tricky and it hasn't been so great to conform with lib standards. However, does any of this matter as you make the change from SMB to Enterprise? Here's where I'm thinking Ubuntu doesn't always match up. Kernel changes, patches etc all require careful maintenance. With most distributions you're able to take things to the bleeding edge. That isn't always the best course when you're dealing with high availability systems. In this regard some of the additional tweaks/QA etc that RH supposedly provides with its products is a good "warm fuzzy" for IT management.

Personally I've gotten to the point that I no longer really care which OS I use, so long as I can ramp up on my needed skills for it and be off. I've run Debian, Ubuntu, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Fedora, Red Hat Linux and truthfully other than the file structure differences and variations on package management, and libraries learning the fundamentals of a distribution helps more than memorizing. While I can see where the press is going, calling Ubuntu the next replacement to RH, I tend to wonder if the realization of going back to their roots will set in and we dont' see RH changing their stance on standards and compliance in the future (not near but hey maybe by RHEL 6)