Action Figure Daniel

Blog

  • I feel rich

    What seems like forever ago (2 years) I changed hosting accounts for my domains, including evanko.net, to consolidate my various websites into a single hosting location. The move was swift and brought with it the current layout and added a photo gallery to the mix. The photo gallery made me happy. There was but one problem, I only had 5 GB for all of my sites. That may seem like a lot but some of my sites are pretty big. So for two years I have been making sure to not go over my capacity.

    Today I logged into my hosting site and notice a different number in my disk space. It didn’t make since, and still doesn’t, so I called and asked. Apparently I have 150 GB for my sites. Suddenly I feel rich with web space!

  • A Quiet Moment

    I have decided, after years of trying to capture the majesty and beauty of sunsets, that it can’t be done. Well, not so much that it can’t be done but that it’s not supposed to be done. You’re not supposed to be able to look at a picture and get the same peace, calm and tranquility as if you were standing atop a hill watching the great blazing sun surrender to the pale, piercing moon; as the world shifts from its vibrant, lively colors to the sharp, silvery hues of night. Sunsets, as with sunrises, would turn into something of cheap experiences not worth having if we could just flip through a book that had capture the same richness as if we had seen it with our own eyes.
    There is also the matter of timing. Being at the right place at the right time to watch the sun or moon rise requires careful attention to their timing. It is a reminder that no matter how important you are, no matter how well you calendar, no matter how many alarms you have, the sun will set whether you are there or not. It is a reminder that no matter how small you feel, no matter how insignificant you see yourself, no matter how desperately you want more in life, the sun will rise whether you are there or not. It is one of only a few events that the time is completely arbitrary and completely out of our control.
    Sunsets are not tied to a precise hour and minute but rather to a precise moment, a quiet moment, a solitary moment, a moment that we can let our souls revel in the beautiful and decisive timing of the universe. The moment is so unlike any other we have in our lives. That moment serves to remind us that we are both the grand and absent. We can see it, experience it and enjoy it but it would happen just the same without. Seeing the moment reminds us that God has definite precision though we are sometimes too small to see it. But it is there as surely as we watch as the sun lowers itself over the edge of the world.

  • If it were a snake it would have bitten you! part 2

    August came and I was getting ready to go back to school. Through the hectic process of purchasing store of stuff and opening two stores of our own a lot of stuff that nobody wanted to deal with at the time had been crammed anywhere it would fit. Most of the stuff went to a back corner of the warehouse where few but me ever ventured. Through the summer I had grown tired of hearing “didn’t we buy one of those from the stores?” The rumored list of the items purchased had proved impossible to find, and I wouldn’t have trusted it anyway. I decided it was high time to gather all the technology stuff from everywhere, get rid of the useless stuff, repair the worthwhile stuff, and get as much as possible into production.

    Going through the warehouse was fairly easy as most of the technology was in one place. Confidence and I took a truck load of stuff to a donation center and I began amassing a second pile. After the warehouse was cleaned out I took on the supply room.

    The Supply Room had long ago become the premier storage center for everything that nobody knew anything about. I decided to clean the whole thing out and organize it. I had chosen the perfect day as there were few other people around to monitor what I was throwing away. My general rule: if we haven’t used in four years, we probably won’t use it in the next year. The donation pile grew and grew, nearly doubling in size.

    Towards the end of the cleaning I rearranged the files and tackled the bottom shelf. On the bottom shelf was a number of white Plexiglas sheets with white tube screwed to them and wires running everywhere. They had appeared on the bottom shelf sometime while I was at school and nobody knew what they were.

    I pulled them out and as I carefully read the tiny writing of the tube and realized that alien-like things were the antennas that go to the used wireless devices. I had seen them all summer, it just took a while to realize that I was actually looking for them. If they were snakes they wouldn’t have gotten me. But if they were walking sticks, they could have stayed there for a very, very long time.

  • If it were a snake it would have bitten you! part 1

    Some time ago, right before I left for school, my employer purchased the inside of a few stores from another company that was liquidating them. Among the items purchased were several Cisco wireless access points, scanners, copiers and other expensive equipment. I left for school and Renown helped oversee the removal of said equipment. When I got back from school I commented that our new stores should have wireless because we bought new Cisco wireless devices. The owner agreed but didn’t know where any of the devices were. In fact, he commented that we should have a plethora because of the new ones that we bought and thought we have sent back and the used ones we bought that he had personally watched the removal of.

    I searched every IT room we had and for months had no luck.Finally, mid-summer I was in desperate need of a CAT5 cable in one of the new stores and found a box that had several such cables. As I dug through the box I also found the once lost wireless devices that we had bought new. I was so excited and got them setup right away. The owner however, grew anxious because we were still missing the used wireless devices. “We sent the Ciscos with the antennas together,” he kept saying. I kept thinking “Antennas, I would think that I would have noticed if there were a bunch of antennas laying around:

    A couple of weeks later I was cleaning out the IT room at the warehouse and realized that if the old Cisco wireless devices had been hungry snakes they would have bitten me, spit me out, bitten me again, then they would have eaten me before I even realized they were there. As I went into the IT room I looked at The IT shelf, and there, right in front of me, were six Cisco boxes. Two were for the wireless in the warehouse and were empty. The other four each had a single device in them each marked for the location we had removed them from. They had been right in front of me, and I had in fact been looking at them, the whole time. I had found most of the missing technology, but we were still out antennas.

  • Non-predictable analytics

    Each of us builds a matrix of predicted outcomes based on specific incomes. We use these to guess how early we should leave for an event, what time we should go to bed, when we should eat lunch, what the weather will be like. Key to build a good predictive matrix is getting good data, reliable data through a process called indexing. I have noticed that some things that should be simple to index and prove nearly impossible to index.

    First example, the traffic patterns for the section of the city my parents live in. One morning I can leave at 9:45am and face nothing but solid traffic. The next morning, still a weekday, I can leave at the exact same time and face nothing but open roads. This varying of traffic seems to have no tie in to the day of the week or even hour of the day. Though I am sure that if one set far enough back to look at enough data one could find enough of a pattern to build an acceptable matrix. Such is, however, beyond my skill.

    Second example, perhaps even more unpredictable is my sisters’ wakeup time. They seem to go to bed at nearly the same time each night. But come morning, the wake up times vary by hours, which I am grateful for. Sometimes my sisters wake up at 7:30am and sometimes they don’t wake up until after 9:30am. Sometimes they wake up at the same for a whole week. Other times they wake up at different times each morning.

    As a whole I have realized that some things are really easy index and thus predict, some things are not.