After 11 years of blogging, I've decided to vastly scale back my commitment to The Dragon's Tales.
There are a lot of events unfolding in my life and it would be best if I focused on those. I'd planned on just doing original work on the blog back in August, but I restarted usual posting because I wanted something to help with the stress: something to hold onto during the grand torrent, the personal maelstrom. Its no longer doing so and I have time commitments far beyond what I have time for.
The Dragon's Gaze will roll on and there will be some posts periodically here, but nowhere near what I was doing before.
I'll be restricting The Dragon's Tales to original posts at this point.
The above image has always been very poignant for me. That's Avrora and Orest in the Dominican Republic with their mom. This was in June 2011. Orest was nearly 2. Avrora was 6. I didn't take the picture (I was in the US working); however, I always felt the picture was from my POV. My daughter ready to walk out into the light. My son looking out but turned somewhat, wondering if he ought to go back. Are they moving on, walking away, growing up? Or am I slipping away into the dark with my daughter accepting and my son not so sure? Or is this the future,my children are that bright future and my mortality and the present is the dark, narrow tunnel? Or is the darkness the fear of change and the bright that future? Or....? There are a million different thoughts which go with the future.
The future is now though. Whatever the meaning of the above, I am facing the future today. Today is my last working day at NERSC, the supercomputing center I have been at since June 2001. After 14 years, I am shifting from HPC geek to rocket scientist full time. I am trading in the Singularity (Rapture of the Nerds!) for the
Space Enthusiast (If Only We Had the Will Power!).
Or perhaps I am just trying to escape Skynet. IN SPACE!
This
shift signals the end of my career in supercomputing. I first logged
into a Cray YMP in fall 1990. Out of the past 25 years, I have had an
account on a supercomputer somewhere within DOE with a short stretch
from 1998 to 2001 as the exception. I have worked as a user or admin on
Cray XMPs, YMPs, C90s, J90s, T3Es, XT4s, XT5s, XC30s and XE6s. I have
worked on IBM SP3s, SP5s and a mongo iDataPlex. I have also worked on
Thinking Machines CM200 and CM5s. Even the odd largish SGI Altix, white
box linux clusters and even a Linux Networx cluster. I have managed
file systems which both span multiple supercomputers and even one which
spanned multiple states. I've assembled a data transfer system which can packet
cannon a sustained 2.5 terabits per second for
bandwidth.
I've done a lot. I've seen a lot. I've also made it to the point where everything I saw in the beginning
of my HPC career is being revisited. Its not just a silly saying when
everything old is new again. In all the architecture meetings and data
handling meetings, this has been almost the uniform theme. And its
uninteresting. When that happens, its time to go...
Fortunately, for me, I'd laid down the plans pretty thoroughly to move on.
And now I am.
From now on, I am a full time rocket scientist. Its more than a little scary.
Its a major life change. I have been working 17 hour days for the past year. Now I'll shift down to 12 hour days, still long, but it will allow me to be better engaged in many things. Especially my kids. For that, I am grateful if nothing else. However, this is a new business and I AM THE BOSS. HOLY SHBT.
One of the life changes is that I
am going to forgo doing much with the blog. The rapid updates recently
were as much to see if I could get the old backlog of articles I'd saved done before I wound
this down. However, I will not completely abandon the blog.
However, for the most part, The blog will update with original content
only. It will probably only be weekly rather than daily.
However, I threw up the ads on here (for those of you not using a blocker). If there are enough clicks for a cup of coffee at a coffee shop per week, I'll guarantee a new article. In fact, let's turn this around. I'll write an article on space, HPC, the robopocalypse, Ukraine or a paleo post every time I get a cup o joe paid for.
Actually, let's nuance this a bit. A cup of coffee is worth a Ukraine update or Robopocalypse report or equivalent. Cup of coffee and a munchie is worth a xenopermian or equivalent. A serious research article will require a full meal folks. :P
Yes. It would be hard, but it is not science fiction.
An earlier post showed how many states Bernie Sanders would win in an absolute general election wipeout. In reality, such a wipeout is impossible. Consider the strongest post-1980 Republican candidacies in each major demographic group. In 1984, Ronald Reagan won 66% of the white vote. Robert Dole won 12% of the black vote. (Actually, Ford won 17% in 1976 and Reagan got 14% in 1980, but no Republican has come that close since.) George W. Bush won 44% of the Latino vote and 43% of Asian-Americans. If our hypothetical Rubio campaign managed to match all those numbers against Sanders, he would get only 55% of the vote. If he matched all those numbers and managed to get minority turnout back to 2004 levels he would get 56%. Now that is a big margin, but it is not 59%.
Moreover, no Republican is going to get 44% of the Latino vote in 2016. Maybe if immigration reform has passed, but that ship has sailed. Even Rubio would do well to match John McCain, which would give him an eight-point margin against Sanders; ten points if minority turnout collapses.
However, the image is NOT mine, but rather a cool picture to add some visual for this. There are no, theorized, worlds made of neutron- and white dwarf star stuff and...dark matter. Take a look.
Fourteen years ago today, I started work at LBNL. I had originally planned for today to be my last day at the Lab. However, if wishes were fishes.
That will come in any event anyways and quite, quite soon. Just not today.
I will commemorate it with this shift for the blog. I am now dropping to two posts per day, excepting the original content, and the original content post: Part 2 of what to do about the Robopocalypse on friday.
Restoring Marberry is a blog by an American gentleman, Brian Kaller, who has moved to rural Ireland and is raising a family. I found the blog because he periodically comes to heck out the science bits I post or write. He has a daughter who, while not exactly like mine, reminds me of my interactions with my precocious girl. Today, though, he has a post on what Saint Patrick's Day is like in Ireland and given what today is...you ought to take a look.
We've reached the next step in the blog transition I started back in November. Originally, I was going to do this at the end of March. Time crunches have dictated I pull this forward.
Posts will now be done every two hours (9,11,1, 3 & 5).
The general themes are going to be TJ & earlier paleo posts at 9 am. Vertebrate paleo, paleoanthropology & some archaeology at 11 am. 1 PM will be planetary science & space exploration oriented. 3 PM will be the sole militaria post. 5 PM will be the grab bag of robopocalypse, crypto currencies, hacking, international politics/economics & sf bay area architecture.
I have been running this blog for ten years now. Its been rather busy and interesting. I've had some serious UPs in life and major CRASHES. Some I've talked about here. Some I have not. I wrote some popular essays on paleo topics when the paleoblogosphere was far more healthy. I've shared crazy thoughts as well. The original content fell as I became busy and yet my traffic grew immensely.
After ten years, its time for a change.
Between now and June 1, I am going to be winding down the regular postings and transitioning to only posts of original content. This will end up reducing my traffic significantly: discontinuing the late night posting dropped my traffic from around 1600 hits per day to 1000. However, there will be more posts of the XenoPermian, my family, crazy thoughts, paleo essays etc.
And it will be a lot less work.
First up to clip is the 5:30 pm posts (and later) and 6 am post. I'll be folding the 5:30 pm/6 pm into the 5 PM slot. The precambrian posts will be in the paleoenvironment slot at 2 pm. The 3:30 and 4:30 PM posts are no longer going to continue at this point. Militaria will be restricted to the 3 & 4 PM slots.
February 6th and March 6th will have a couple original content posts each. February 6th will have the "What to do About the Robopocalypse?" Crazy Thought post and another XenoPermian post. March is undecided at this point.
The next 'downshift' for posting will be March 26th.
