If I've got a funny look on my face..

..it's because I'm thinking. Today is a deep-thinking day. Think. Think. Think. Now I'm thinking of growing up the son of am IBMer with "THINK" written in capital bold letters on tiny notepads, desktop "things", and nearly everything else.

Think. Think. Think.

If it were an IPv6 snake it would have bit me

I've wondered why my Apple Airport Extreme at the beach would create IPv6 networks with a /48 bit netmask and my Soekris M0n0wall router would create /64 netmask networks by default. The reason is glaringly obvious! The Apple Airport Extreme expects to create only one LAN network while M0n0wall is configured for multiple LAN (or wireless) interfaces hence the M0n0wall router will reserve the other 16 network bits for netmask.

This means that, should a M0n0wall device have enough umph it could, in theory, have a single WAN interface and 65535 LAN interfaces** all configured as a different subnet with each LAN having a full 64 bits left over for host identification (thus enabling IPv6 Stateless Address Autoconfiguration).

In a word - SWEET!!!

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** M0n0wall seems to start with the subnet of 0001 thus providing a real-world 65534 subnets each with a /64 bit host field.

Today has been a long day at the tail end of a LONGER week

This week is nearly over and I will be happy when it's behind me. Nothing terribly "wrong" is happening at work it's just that EVERYTHING is happening all at once! Could not some of these projects have waited until the other ones finished? Not only that but why do all the "mission critical" projects start at once?

Today I did not do my 2nd workout of the day when I got home. I went grocery shopping instead. The two "kids" that checked me at the, well, checkout isle both looked 10 years old! I'm sure they were at least whatever the minimum working age happens to be (16?). It's just confirmation that the big FOUR-OH is looming on the horizon like a giant sledgehammer waiting to bash me over the head. Yes, I'm getting ahead of myself as I'll turn 39 this year but for DECADES of being "the young guy" putting that behind is difficult but something I'm sure I'll grow accustomed to.

An unusual valediction

Watch those typo's people, some more worse and more funny than others. Today brings this closing gem on a (nearly) department-wide email:

Best Retards,

(EDITED)

Somehow I think he was going for "Best Regards,".

What's needed..

Lynch (Documentary)

The aptly titled "Lynch" is a Netflix streaming documentary that follows David Lynch during the filming of his then latest movie Inland Empire. Before I go much further I'll have to admit I did not watch the full film. The new LG Blu-Ray/Netflix box is still a bit unfamiliar and I managed to hit the wrong remote button ceasing display of the movie and taking me back to the "root menu" of the device. Whoops. Work was heating up right around then so I dropped the idea of a background movie and knuckled under to take care of business.

What I did see thus far was even more strange than I would have expected. David Lynch has an, well, unusual mind and it comes across in his very unusual films (Eraserhead, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Mulholland Drive, Wild at Heart among others). Still I wasn't quite prepared for David Lynch the unfiltered man behind the lens. Random shots of him walking proclaiming to an unseen person "Watch that man! Watch that man! Watch that man!" were strange enough but the thing that struck me was, while on-set talking to his production crew he matter-of-factly stated "I want a fifteen year-old girl, an *ATTRACTIVE* fifteen year-old girl, a one-legged Asian woman and a monkey. Make it a spider monkey." The hilarious thing was nobody batted an eye! It was as if this was the most normal request that he could have made that particular day.

David Lynch must be an absolute trip to work with. If I could afford to I'd take time off from work and weasel my way into one of his sets as a production assistant and I don't care who I'd have to buy off to make it happen.

640k of ram should be enough for anybody

This quote, widely credited to Bill Gates (but denied by the same), really got me thinking today. "Back in the day", say, oh, around the early 1990's, before Windows and OS/2 really hit the mainstream, my rather large desktop computer had around half a meg of ram if I recall. I remember vividly the day I broke a meg and later four then an unheard of 64 megs of RAM. Around 1995 I watched Burton Floyd install a gig of ram on a card the size of a spiral notebook into a Silicon Graphics server the size of a dishwasher. I was amazed that a server could fit that much ram inside!

Now I'm sitting here with my new laptop running a cool 4 gigs of RAM. Goodness, how time does fly and Moore's Law keep chugging away. I haven't yet touched the 4 gig limit, but then again I don't yet have Final Cut Pro loaded so given enough time I'm sure something on my system will eventually page out or swap due to low memory.

Still, 4 gigs of RAM in a notebook (with an additional 256 megs of video RAM). Who would have thought such a thing just a few years ago?

Apple would you please consider the following:

1. enable IPv6 by default on the Apple TV and Time Capsule
2. enable IPv6 on the iPhone and iPod Touch

That is all. For right now.