Poetry

In Salutation to the Eternal Peace

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by Sarojini Naidu

Men say the world is full of fear and hate,
And all life’s ripening harvest-fields await
The restless sickle of relentless fate.

But I, sweet Soul, rejoice that I was born,
When from the climbing terraces of corn
I watch the golden orioles of Thy morn.

What care I for the world’s desire and pride,
Who know the silver wings that gleam and glide,
The homing pigeons of Thine eventide?

What care I for the world’s loud weariness,
Who dream in twilight granaries Thou dost bless
With delicate sheaves of mellow silences?

Say, shall I heed dull presages of doom,
Or dread the rumoured loneliness and gloom,
The mute and mythic terror of the tomb?

For my glad heart is drunk and drenched with Thee,
O inmost wind of living ecstasy!
O intimate essence of eternity!

Sailing

Death and Sailing

Happy Birthday A Team! It’s been far too long since I last wrote an entry. Hello to everyone out in Internet land. Have you heard the story of Dan Eldon? I am not fond of the site, but you can get an idea of what an amazing photographer and artist he was before his untimely death.

A-cat RacingRacing my cat in the Kickoff regatta was great. Rob Howe took a photo of me outpacing a Prindle 19 in flat water and a stiff breeze (that’s me on the right). You can see the BIG version of the photo here. I also found a photo that shows me preparing to round the leeward mark. In the end, the race committee was smoking crack and robbed Julian of a first place, but the conditions were ideal. Division Three [used to have] more information online.

I sent a message to Sailing Anarchy asking if they had any articles on the A-Class cats…they responded by asking me if I wanted to write one for them. They MUST be anarchists.

Sailing

A blustery day on the water

Do you care what the weather is up to o’er ‘ere? Check out the local met station webpage. Julian and I discovered yesterday it is fairly easy handle the cats in fierce conditions, although I confess we had the sails completely de-powered. The wind was similar to today’s reading:

   $ finger met@sealion.ucsc.edu 
        Wind Speed:             +14.592 m/s     (+32.642 mph)
        Maximum Wind Gust:      +16.376 m/s     (+36.633 mph)

Whoa Bessie!

Security

The cost of VPN deployment

Had an interesting talk with some folks from Nortel and IBM this morning about managing VPNs. I was told that an insurance company in Northern CA recently spent $1.1 million, more than double their investment in hardware and software, installing remote VPN clients and pushing out updates.

The IBM rep also told a funny story. He said someone had to drive all the way to a branch office to receive the new VPN software. The person became very annoyed, however, when they found out they were expected to bring their PC with them for the update. Apparently they said “Someone should have told me I needed to bring my computer here to have the software installed!”

Push software was tried, but it was inconvenient to end users. Since many of them relied on v90 dial-up connections, they did not appreciate a 3MB push to their computer, especially when they were trying to upload files to meet critical deadlines. They also complained about having to leave their computers running overnight. Clearly any push solution that claims to be efficient, easy, and nonintrustive has to take into account the behavior of recipients, and not just the needs of IT management.

Also discovered that the W3C allows you to easily validate my cascading style sheets.