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.
I'm a little disturbed. My most popular posts for the last week have been the pix I take on the way to the office with the odd titles that pop into my head. o.O
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
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.
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.
My father would have been 66 today. He died on September 1st, 2013.
I expected him to be around for another 20 years at least. My family is normally long lived, at least for the men. I expected him to be a participant in my son's life.
My grandfather, his father, beat three different cancers. It was my father's unwillingness to go to the doctor which killed him: he didn't go until AFTER it had metastasized and then he fought it for seven years (!!) until he died and he fought bitterly until the end.
Get yourself screened for cancer, folks.
You're going to get a series of PaleoProterozoic to MesoProterozoic maps from a recent paper.
Folks, since I didn't get any suggestions on the blog name, I went with what I had in mind.
The Dragon's Gaze is the blog where I will be moving over all the exoplanet papers I come across to link to, links to other blogs about exoplanets and occasionally an original post. I will not pull the current blog posts on The Dragon's Tales over to them, but will be discontinuing any new posts here on the subject. The posts will be on a schedule, like I have made the Dragon's Tales, but it will be once per three hours.
Lately I have been trying to put a couple links per day at noon and 1 pm PT to exoplanet papers as they come out. It had been sufficient to keep up with the amount coming through. However, in the past month and change, this is no longer the case. I tried adjusting upwards to 3 per day, but the backlog of papers is just growing worse. I thought at first I could just ride it out, but...not gonna happen. As Doug put it, exoplanet research is going through the same renaissance physics did during the 1920s. There will be no catch up! At least with two or three posts per day. I might as well dedicate the blog to exoplanet research papers then! Rather than do so, I am going to fork the blog. I am open to name suggestions. I have one in mind, but we'll see.
My Blog's popularity has - for whatever reason - seemed to have radically jumped. It went up significantly when school started again. However, in October here, its leapt once more. Is google's analytics broken? A week ago, my blog was getting 1/2 the hits it is now and I'm questioning the #s' reality.
That said, I am seeing a significant number of links from reddit and FB these days...which is a new development.
