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One of the things that I love to do is listen to some loud and rocking tunes! I don't do it often anymore because usually Julie is in the Pilot with me, or I'm sitting downstairs with her, and she would complain about hearing the bleed from my headphones. Last night I went up to my "Fortress of Solitude" (or the "cat room" for those of you who have been over) and cranked up the TUNES.

I've been exploring a bit and I've been finding some new music, but I really do think that there's more out there that I just don't know about, but would love to hear!

Yesterday morning, Julie and I were on our way in to work and I had the radio on some classical pops. I was utterly thrilled because a guitar piece came on that was the full version of one of the pieces that I'm learning how to play. She quickly recognized it (or at least found it VERY familiar) since it's something that I have a habit of playing over and over again.

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This morning I was working on some Exchange 2010 stuff and I felt the need to monitor the latency of the mailflow on one of my servers. Not really wanting to do anything fancy, I opened up the Exchange Management Shell and wrote this code:

while ($true) {
Clear-Host
test-mailflow
start-sleep -s 10
}

This gave me a nice little window that ran the test-mailflow cmdlet every 10 seconds and didn't clutter things up. I'm sure there is a more elegant way of doing this, but I didn't really know how to go about it! Tomorrow the plan is to put this up there with a shorter interval while I'm hammering on some of the other VMs in the environment to see what I can do with the latency in my little lab (:

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One of the things that I've been giving a lot of thought to over the past several years is the nature of thought and the human mind. I've given it a lot of thought, but I've never really sat down and put into words many of the concepts that I've had banging around. Recently on the game show, Jeopardy, there was a game between two of the best players of the game and a computer designed to answer natural-language questions. The method of it's weighing of answers was similar to what humans do, but it had the advantage of being much quicker to click the button than either of the two humans. Over the course of two episodes, Watson (the computer) soundly trounced the two humans.

I realize that there was a lot more to the show than what we saw on TV. Watson crashed often, and it took hundreds of test games for the developers and programmers to tune the algorithms that it used. While that is something that wasn't talked about much, it's important to note that we're in no danger of being overrun by mechanical overlords anytime soon!

This imagination, the idea that we hold in our heads that we're going to be eliminated or overrun by machines is what has me writing this post now. It is the central theme, and honestly, I think this is part of what makes us "human" in most senses of the word.

History

A while ago, I was reading the book Anathema by Neal Stephenson. Not to get too much into the plot or detail of the book, one of the things explored was the nature of thought and memory, and it has been a set of conversations that I've been thinking quite a bit about. In a basic sense, one of the concepts explored was the idea that something that is odd about "people" is that they have the ability to ask things like "what if?" We have the capacity to hold, in our little brains, whole parallel universes where one thing is different, or one act comes out in a different manner, or we extrapolate in a very detailed manner what will happen in the future. The ability to hold this little image of un-reality in our head is actually quite amazing! Watching the episodes of Jeopardy with the computer, Watson, brought some of these facts to head. First off, one of the key figures in the project pointed out something quite interesting. For quite a bit of time, the people who have worked with Artificial Intelligence have assumed that the difficult part of creating a truly sentient being would be the things that humans struggle with themselves; the ability to learn massive amounts of data and sort through them in a swift and efficient manner. What they found, however, this was the EASY part, and the hard part is the actual synthesis of new ideas, all because the machine has no real mechanism (as yet) to be able to ask "what if?"

I know that I'm simplifying things quite a bit, but I don't want to turn this into too much of a long drawn out thesis. So, now that I've exposed this idea of the "holographic mind," the idea that the brain holds numerous iterations of the entire universe, simulations of reality, I can come to the real reason why I've wanted to write all this out.

Daily Activities

Honestly, this is something that I'm sure most people don't care about, but this really is (I feel) important to know about how our minds work. Human science and medicne are concerned with how the chemicals and "meat" portions of the body work, but anyone really digging into less explored aspects is looked at with some worry. I've never been concerned about that, simply for the fact that this was the same way people treated doctors when astrology was still considered a mainstream science.

What makes thinking about this so interesting and important is that philosophers and religious leaders have given a lot of thought to the idea of the soul and always asked the question of "where does it reside?" and "what does it actually contain?" It's well known that other animals develop intelligence and humor, they are clever and can pass on learning to others. What then, makes us any different? I think this ability to construct large-scale scenarios and simulations of almost any scale is what really sets us apart. Many romantics will say that it's our ability to dream and fantasize, and that (while grossly simplified) is exactly what I'm thinking. When we are in line at the supermarket, planning out what we want to make with the things in our cart, we usually picture and construct the whole scenario. We're cooking, making the dish, others come in and we eat, we talk about our day and share. Sitting there and letting the dreams come, and not only simulating what we will do, but what the others will be doing is something quite complex and quite amazing!

Learning

Our whole lives we have the ability to grow and learn and change who and what we are to a great degree. One of the quotes from Star Trek: The Next Generation has really gotten into my head about how we manage to learn and change. One of the members of the ship's crew is an android and he tells a child that he is amazed because while he can walk, and run, and move around faster and more precisely than a human, all that ability is totally dependent on his legs remaining exactly the same length, while the child can run and walk and play while constantly growing and changing.

Our ability to learn is the same with regards to the way we simulate the world. What it looks like we do is develop the ability to take a snapshot, like a picture, of how we are perceiving reality, and store that as a base image that we then use to build out our simulations and scenarios. When we are young, we are constantly trying to gather up a larger and larger cache of those snapshots. Sometimes we passively take those snapshots, while other times we have to take a hand in building a situation that we want to simulate so that we have the starting point we want to work from. Picture a child who is in a "testing" mood. They will do something that they know they are forbidden to do, and while parents have many reasons why they do this, they miss one of the deep underlying causes. The child has a theory of how the scenario will play out, but is learning to trust that simulation. They need to decide if what the previous snapshot predicted is correct. That is much more what they are testing than the ability of an adult to catch them doing something they are not supposed to be doing.

While all this learning is going on, we tend to see many other aspects of the simulation mind developing. Constantly asking more and more questions, rambling around, testing, probing and exploring are also methods of expanding this simulation to a macro scale (why is the sun hot?) and to the micro scale (why do we have to kill the germs on our hands by washing them?). We are building our understanding of the world so that we can hone the focus of our simulations, based on the situational snapshots we've taken.

Out of Whack

Sometimes we have problems with this, however, and things can go wrong. The two things that I think are most common are a breakdown of the snapshot process and a breakdown of the simulation process. These two situations can cause all sorts of other problems.

Snapshot Breakdown

Often times we talk to people who seem to not be living in our world. We put all sorts of names on those people, but they usually suffer from two distinct problems. There are those who are not able to take and use new snapshots, and so are limited to living in a world of their own, or there are those who have a strong ability to create non-contiguous snapshots and live in a world different than everyone else. Living in the past or on another planet.

I've noticed, often times, that people talk about getting old and losing our ability to learn, or become set in our ways. This, I think, is a mild case of our snapshots getting stuck. Sometimes, this is taken to extremes. There are some people who I've been dealing with recently who are wholly unable to cope with any shock that would upset the one old snapshot that they've come to love, and that they keep using. Often these people are noticeable because they don't examine the reality of a situation, but change the facts of the past and present to fit the idealized model they have internally. In the case of people I'm dealing with, they will talk to you about a plan that they have to improve the efficiency of a process, but fail to note that they are the reason that the process isn't efficient. When confronted with feedback along those lines, their conscious brain shuts down and they lash out in any manner that they can to prove that they are NOT the problem until internal equilibrium is restored.

Simulation Overrun

This is a whole separate topic, and I'm going to break it out into another post!

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I’m trying to come up with some ways to drive traffic to my blog. Not really for any reason, other than normal narcissistic ones. Here are some ideas I have:

·         Think up some gimmick

o   Live 100 days without showering (might be problematic)

o   Cook 100 different recipes from a much-loved cookbook (been done to death by others)

o   Take funny pictures or videos of my cats (been done to undeath by others)

o   Grab some fad at random and write about how wonderful it is (using Google Trends to target my audience)

·         Post short fiction that captures the hearts of millions, as they identify with my protagonist

·         Write scathing details of my work life

·         Write scathing details of my private life

·         Come up with long, barely coherent rants about random topics (Hmmm.. already doing this one)

·         Post racy photos of attractive females (my wife might have a problem with that; she’s the only attractive female I have access to)

·         Make lots of lists about:

o   Books

o   Movies

o   Music

o   Lists

o   Ways to drive up traffic

·         Plead with people to read my blog (bribery only works if you have something to bribe WITH)

·         Write detailed technical content

I’m open to suggestions if anyone has anything more to add!

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My wife facilitates some classes, and gets to have some fun sharing with me some of the great responses from her students. One time, a student commented that, “reading is for the birds!” To this day I’m still amused to no end at that comment and it just reminds me of how lucky I am that I really enjoy learning and reading and all the things that I do like to do.

In that list of activities there, I put down that I love to learn, but that’s tempered with the warning that I love to learn about things that I’m interested in. I never did very well in school because I had a somewhat loose attitude about paying attention to things that I considered boring, or that I felt that I already knew plenty about. Now that I’m working for a company that’s interested in helping me set career goals and achieve them, I have a chance to learn new things that may not entice me, coupled with the maturity to do the work anyway.

One of the things that I’ve learned about my learning style (and my style in general) is that I have to set goals and then work on accomplishing them. In the past, I’ve found that I learn better in a more structured environment because those goals are set by someone else, and all I have to do is make it to them. Over the past year, I have kept working on getting better about procrastinating less and working harder at setting my own goals. I think that today I’ve reached a milestone!

I’ve been telling myself and others that I’m working on getting some certifications, and to get to that goal, I’ve been reading some material about Exchange Server 2010. Today I decided to solidify that goal and made an appointment to take the exam, without any external influence telling me that I had to make and meet that commitment. I think that this is a big step for me, so I’m interested in how I do on the exam, measured against how much preparation I actually did.

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Okay, I’m not talking about spring or basketball or anything silly like that. It’s the time of year when I can get those tasty Girl Scout Cookies!

I really do enjoy nomming down on a box of Tagalongs, but this year, Julie and I are being more circumspect than in the past. In deference to her continued weight loss, we did buy some cookies, but I took them to work, and I’m not having them hidden around the house as in years past. This will mean that I have to share with my co-workers, but I think that is an acceptable sacrifice to make.

As I eat them, I think about the time, months from now, when I will down my last hoarded cookie. I will look back on this time of plenty with a tear in my eye, but also the hope in my heart that the season will return!

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Last night I got a bunch of prep work done, and got started building the sawhorses that I would need to build my workbench. The reason why I got started, but didn’t finish is because I took for granted having all the material I needed.

I got a miter saw set up on the floor (thanks Sean and Julie!) and started measuring. I had some long 2x4’s and figured that out of each I could get two 36 inch boards and one shorter. The longer boards were going to be the top and bottom of the I-beam shape, and the shorter would be the middle. This would allow me to clamp all the way around the top board, even on the ends. I was going to assemble the I-beams and then measure for the legs. I want to miter them so the face of the leg sits flush on the I-beam (just me trying to be fancy). As I was laying things out and getting the drill ready to start putting the pilot holes in, I looked for the screws so I could double-check the length (I have been totally measuring twice this project). Well, there was a problem with that…

Back in the apartment (and before), I had a big box of 2 inch drywall screws. I loved using these for woodworking because they hold well and they are easy to sink or remove, so I thought they would be perfect for this plan. Sadly, they are nowhere to be found!!! D’oh!

So, I ended my woodworking for the night with a trip to the hardware store, and picked up some of the things that I’ve been meaning to get, and a big box of 2 inch drywall screws…

I’m working on this project as a stepping stone and as a proof-of-concept that I still have the skills I used to. It seems that if I am focused on what I’m doing, I’m still able to measure accurately and cut the line where I want it to be cut. The next part is going to be laying out the screw holes, drilling the screw-well with some Forsner bits, pilot drilling, and then filling the holes with some dowels and glue. It’s way more than I need to be doing with a set of sawhorses, but I’m having a great time (except for crawling around on the garage floor because I don’t have a work surface yet)!

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Gar! Long break!

I've been working on getting back into the swing of my handicrafts, and on the list of things to do is to build back up the stock of tools that I once enjoyed having access to with my father's workshop. Right now, I'm trolling around looking for things that I'll need to get. My family has been wonderful in getting me the tools that I've asked for, for birthdays and Christmases past, but I'm now getting serious about things.

The current tool on my list to make serious progress in the direction I want to go is a router. I've done some research and I think that I would like to get the combination router (plunge and fixed bases) instead of buying one now and then a second tool later on. I'm thinking about getting the Dewalt DW618PK. It's gotten quite a few nice reviews (and some bad ones) but I think that my own brand-loyalty will help me be comfortable with that decision.

On my way to getting the tools that I need, I have several intermediate steps on my journey. Here is the plan that I've outlined!

Tonight I'm planning on making a set of sawhorses similar to the ones found on this site. It's dead-simple and I've used ones like them before, so it will be a good chance to test out how much I remember about marking, measuring and cutting.

Next on the list will be to use those sawhorses to help be build an actual workbench. I've found some great videos on FineWoodworking.com in their free video section for beginning woodworkers, here (the videos for constructing the bench are in the list, I just can't link to the video directly). I really like the look of the workbench and I think that it will be really helpful when I start to make the rest of the things on my "list".

Once the bench is completed, I think I'll be ready to start on a couple of my "real" projects. The one that it at the top of my list it going to be building a bed for whatever child Julie and I adopt. I'm planning on making something similar to the plans linked here, but nothing is officially decided yet.

One of the things that really makes me want to do this project is that I remember my dad working hard to make a crib for one of my nephews. He really poured his heart out into the project, and he had made beds for a couple family members. There aren't many places that people feel safer than in their beds, and that is one thing that I want to make sure of, is that any child we bring into our home feels safe and comfortable!

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I got Google Analytics set up on the blog a little while ago to see some of the traffic information of people hitting my site. I don’t have a ton of visitors, but looking at it today I see that it looks like someone in Poland has looked at my site!

Maybe I need to branch out and write something controversial to drive some traffic!

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One of the comfort foods that I love to have is a simple, old, family favorite: red beans and rice. There aren’t many other foods that I can sit down to, meal after meal, like a good pot of red beans! After a wonderful visit with my family, my wife and I decided that we might want to get a regular meal rotation into effect and that the historic “Monday is red beans and rice day” would be the way we want to go.

According to my grandma (“Hello!” *wave*), the family always had red beans and rice on Monday because that was wash day. So much of the help and family was involved, something had to be put on to cook that didn’t require a lot of preparation and oversight. Talking to my uncle (“Hi Uncle Ray!” *wave*), he told me about a time when he worked at running the family Kwik-E-Mart type store, and that was one of the things that they made. Putting the beans on the night before, cooking them up in the morning, and having them ready for people to stop in at lunch was part of his routine. Side note: When we were driving around in Louisiana, it seemed that almost every gas station had fresh cracklins and boudin. It was hard NOT to be eating the whole time we were down there.

Now that the history is out of the way, the point of this post is I want to share the secret family recipe that Julie and I have been using, and a couple of variations that I’ve heard of and tried.

The Basic Pot

1 lb. Smoked Sasuage (cut into ½ in. thick sections)

1 lb. Light Red Kidney Beans

2 cups Diced Onion (about the size of a trimmed pinky nail)

1 tablespoon Salt (I don’t actually measure, I just add a little bit more than I feel it needs)

Put all the ingredients in a crock-pot, fill with water (about 1-2 inches higher than the beans), cook on low for 6-8 hours. Enjoy!

Spice it Up a Little

Everything from “The Basic Pot” plus:

3 crushed cloves Garlic

1 teaspoon cinnamon

1 large bay leaf

1 heaping teaspoon Tony’s (Tony Chachere’s Original Creole Seasoning for the un-initiated) or more, to taste

This spices things up a bit. Adding the Tony’s can give it a bite and the cinnamon gives is something of an exotic flavor. This is where I love to experiment! I’ve used everything from cumin to rosemary to  Worchestershire sauce. It’s hard to make this dish inedible (to me) but there ARE combinations I won’t try again.

Getting a Little Fancy

This is a little different, for someone who wants to make the meal an EXPERIENCE. One of the things that’s different about this recipe is the blending of the canned beans. Often times, the pot of red beans matures and is best by the second or third serving, after multiple cycles of reheating. A way to get close to the same result is start off with some bean-insides chopped up and floating around making a thick sauce from the start. At least, that’s the theory.

1 lb Light Red Kidney Beans (dried)

1 can (16-20 oz) Light or Dark Red Kidney Beans

1 small Ham Bone (about 2-3 lbs. Look for about 1 lb. of meat)

3 crushed cloves of Garlic

2 cups Diced Onion (about the size of a trimmed pinky nail)

1 cup Diced Bell-pepper (about the size of a trimmed pinky nail)

½ cup Chopped Celery (you can add more, but I don’t like it!)

On to the HARD PART!

1.       Soak the dry beans overnight (at least 4-6 hours) and drain

2.       In a food-processor, blend the canned beans until chunky sauce

3.       Take the ham bone and put on a broiler pan and place in the oven at 200 degrees for about 2 hours

4.       Take 2 tablespoons ham bone drippings from the bottom of the broiler pan and put them in a large pot on medium heat. Add 2 tablespoons of flour to the drippings and heat while stirring constantly until chocolate brown. (This is called a roux, the basis for a LOT of Cajun and southern cooking. It’s really easy to mess up and overcook it, so save lots of the drippings in case it burns or turns bitter)

5.       As soon as the roux is the correct color, add the aromatics (onion, celery and bell-pepper, or the “holy trinity”) and garlic, and sauté until the onion starts to go “clear” (or translucent for you geeks out there).

6.       Add blended beans, soaked beans, ham bone and enough water to cover everything and bring to a boil.

7.       Once boiling, cover, reduce heat and simmer for 2-4 hours, until the beans are tender and the meat is falling off the ham bone, stirring every once in a while.

8.       Cook some rice and enjoy!

Disclaimer: I couldn’t remember if the roux was 1:1 or 1:2, so I looked it up at this link. The rest of this recipe comes from me making some of it up on the spot, and some things that I’ve read about from other recipes. There are a LOT of them out there, and I do not want to take credit from where it’s due.

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When I am trying to learn something, my goal is to find at least one thing that I didn’t know before and to celebrate the improvement of my understanding. Today’s topic is CAS server proxy, redirection and authentication.

First off, back when I was on some early versions of the Exchange 2010 TAP program, I heard about CAS redirection and proxy activities and I didn’t really have a firm grasp of it. Now I’ve had some time to kick it around in my head and I understand things a bit better. When you have two AD sites, each with Internet-facing CAS servers (open through the firewall AND reachable DNS URL), the CAS server you connect to will redirect you to the correct CAS (and correct URL) if your mailbox is in a different site. If only ONE site has an Internet-facing CAS server, then the one you connect to will PROXY your connection to the correct CAS server.

Today, this bit of information was a double-whammy, not because I learned something new, but because I now understand a different little bit that I was waggling around. An Internet-facing  CAS server can use any kind of authentication (forms-based, Basic), but you need to have “Integrated Windows Authentication” turned to ON, on all the internal CAS servers that it will be serving as a proxy.

One of the lines of introspection and discovery that I now want to pursue is how the authentication works in a legacy (2007) domain when installing a 2010 CAS server (the first step in a good migration). I know many people already know and understand all of this, but it’s not something that I come across every day, so I count it as extra knowledge!

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Here are some pictures of our three bird-feeders! They're full and ready for the cats.

See the full gallery on Posterous

See the full gallery on Posterous

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While practicing the guitar, I’ve found a level of peace that I really enjoy. I only know two songs that I can get into, to the point where I am happy, but I’m working on learning more.

One of the things that has prevented me from progressing as fast as I would like is my slacker-ish attitude when it comes to some of the basics, like sight reading. My teacher has gone over it, but I am more likely to learn the pattern of each measure, instead of what’s actually written on the page.

I remember that I seemed to do this quite often when I played in band in high school. The placement of the fingers and the sound of the instrument (and whole band) was much more what guided me in what I needed to be playing, rather than what was written on the page.

In the interest of working on this, I’ve gone out and started looking for some tools to help me on note recognition and BASIC music theory. Here is a link to a little game that I found (and below that the link to the parent site with more games) that helps with basic, intermediate or advanced note recognition.

Game:

http://pedaplus.com/flash/treblebeg.html

Parent Site:

http://pedaplus.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogsection&id=7&Itemid=142

Since I’ve found that I can’t code my way out of a paper bag, I would gladly pay money to someone who can develop a game for my phone that will flash a note and then read the input of what I play on my acoustic guitar (similar to my phone-based tuner). Sort of like a “Math Blaster” for classical guitar!

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With my trip to Winnipeg and then to Louisiana, my learning plan has been totally derailed. I’m hoping to get back on track with getting some Microsoft certifications starting next week. First up is getting my hands around Microsoft Exchange 2010!

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I keep wanting to go out and tell them it's not time to grow yet, but I know they won't listen!

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I’m working right now on uploading all my photos to my home server as a backup method. I’ve been having a lot of fun looking through all the photos I have, but I do wonder where there are more! It always seems like I’ve got to have more pictures, but honestly, it’s not something that I do often.

Photos are a really helpful tool for remembering good times, so I think that taking more and better photos is going to go on the list of self-improvements that I’ve been working on. Just simple reminders of where I am on any given day. Somewhat like a journal, but a bit less involved (:

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