persistent mounting on linux

stolen from a well written forum post:

You'll want to edit your /etc/fstab file. I don't know of any GUI alternative.

Perform your mount command, then view the contents of /etc/mtab (through the text editor of your choice, or cat). There'll be a line there that reflects how fstab and mtab expresses your mount. Copy that line and paste it in /etc/fstab.

To see if it worked, unmount your resource (share, disk, whatever), then do 'mount -a' with root privileges. It should read fstab and remount it, and if it doesn't, output a neat error message hopefully explaining why.

the pollyanna chronicals: helping others

a few weeks ago, an older woman came into my father-in-law's place of work with car troubles and a 17 year old car. she was having trouble paying her taxes and couldn't afford to fix the car and her fridge was dying - she couldn't safely keep food more than 24 hours.

being the doll that my father-in-law is, he found the cheapest way possible to fix her car and gave her $100 from his wallet. when he told my wonderful husband about the woman, my love got on his favorite internet forums and posted the story looking for a free, gently used refrigerator. within 12 hours, he got not 1 but 3 offers for refrigerators that we could pick up and bring to this lady.

we picked up one of the fridges, confirmed that it worked and called the lady to arrange delivery. she was delighted with the fridge and very grateful that we pulled it all together for her.

i'm just amazed at the wonderful, generous family i have :o)

-s

Scrum and Agile development

i'm so sick of scrum and agile.

they're great ideas taken waaaaay too far. how does an industry spring up around a concept of breaking a task down to the simplest elements and completing them and still have the concept maintain integrity. a light-weight process can't remain light-weight when you have to have months of training and a heavy-weight tool to manage it. it just doesn't work. at some point it becomes hypocritical.

spending months trying to figure out how to 'properly' implement scrum defeats the purpose of scrum. you can't know what you can't know so you take the smallest step that moves you forward, evaluate and take the next step. wait ... that's agile.


argh.

housing bailouts

"The lenders may have compelling reasons not to find new borrowers to help, according to the study. For example, up to 45 percent of borrowers who did receive some kind of help on their loans ended up in arrears again, the study found. Conversely, about 30 percent of delinquent borrowers are able to fix their problems without help from their lenders."
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2009/07/07/lenders_avoid_redoing_loans_fed_concludes/?page=1

so ... if 45% of the folks are going to default anyway and 30% are going to fix their issues anyway ... why should we be bailing these homeowners out? private companies that are interested in make a profit (oh no! PROFIT! they might want to pay their employees???) don't see this as a good investment, why should tax payers?

45% are going to abuse the system no matter what we do - why give them more taxpayer dollars??? maybe they're not abusing the system. maybe they're honestly struggling. but that means they need to make some fundamental changes to their lives to fix the problem and propping them up doesn't help them long term and doesn't help america long term.

30% are going to manage anyway; i'm sure the money would be helpful to them and they would appreciate it - but SO WOULD I. we all struggle to balance our budgets (well, except for the government because they still think they can raise taxes when they need more money ... i wish i could just give myself a raise whenever i needed more money!) and sometimes make bad decisions. we take responsibility for it and fix it ourselves ... we don't expect taxpayers to bail us out.

by my calculations, that leaves 25% that may benefit from assistance. 25% that may be struggling through a divorce or medical bills and need more than 6 months to get their lives in order (or completely fall apart). these folks probably should get some help but the help should come from family and friends and community, not tax payers.

family, friends, and community are close enough to see when their contributions are helping a situation and when they start enabling a situation. they're also close enough to do something about it if the family starts struggling with that line - provide advice, counseling, modify support so it helps but doesn't enable.

but family, friends and community need less money going to taxes so they can support each other this way.

-s

the pollyanna chronicals: the kindness of strangers

i'm getting married in 8 days!!! :)

but before i do, i needed a certified copy of my divorce papers. a nuisance, but no big deal.

i took the morning off to drive out to the courthouse and pick them up.

except the courthouse where i got divorced was closed. not closed as in "come back in an hour and they'll be open" but closed as in boarded up. uh oh.

i walked around the building trying to find some indication of where the courthouse went with no luck until a group of older puerto rican gentleman starting yelling 'hey lady, the building is closed!' i'm not in the greatest area of the city and i'm by myself. but it was 10am and 2 blocks from the police station so i initiated a conversion with them. 'do you know where the courthouse is now?' 'just around the corner on main street - i'm heading that direction, let me walk you there.'

um ..... ok?

definitely a little nervous, but again it's 10am not 10pm and the streets aren't exactly empty. i joined the gentlemen who turned out to be very sweet gentlemen for the 5 minute walk around the corner to where the courthouse is now located. i learned that one of them had a 23 year old daughter and 26 year old son; he hadn't seen his son in 23 years and the son is coming up from puerto rico next month to visit him.

in the end, i got to the courthouse, got the papers i needed, and enjoyed a nice conversation with a very sweet gentleman. he really made the situation a lot better and i enjoyed meeting him.