The Empirical Manifesto

Its been years since I fired up an SGI and that was when I installed an Indigo 2 and never used it again. The manual package selection and dependency resolution was insane. But somehow this little Indy seems lighter. And faster.

I found a year-old post on the Vintage Computer Facebook group I belong to and reached out as he was interested in selling them. Much to my surprise, he still had them a full year after advertising them, and I agreed to pick them up. In Saint Louis. It just so happened he was coming to KC in a couple of weeks and would bring them with him, halving my 16-hour round trip drive to just eight. The game was afoot!

He arrived in a freaking Astin Martin (black sports car, he'd texted when he arrived at the predetermined spot lol). I got a working Indy, a non-working Indy, and a half populated Challenge (server version of the Indy workstation). I'd already been researching SCSI-to-SSD configurations and was pleasantly surprised to find people were booting their SGIs with SD cards from a SCSI add-in. Thing is, my Raspberry Pi boots from SD, and while unremarkable, not sexy. Of course many of the so-called solutions were just under $80, and that seemed steep for a 100Mhz processor on a 30-year old machine. But I did find a 50-pin "fast" SCSI-to-SAS adapter. And SATA can fit on SAS, its just runs at an amazeballs 6GB/sec instead of the SAS's amazeballs 12GB/s but again, we're talking 40MB/sec fast-SCSI. And SATA SSDs are cheap. And if it didn't work I could always put a 15k SAS drive in there. And the adapter was only $4. HELL YEAH.

So I spent overnmight and most of the day configuring it, playing with it, admiring it, and of course manually resolving all those goddamn software dependencies. But its the most fun I've had with an O/S in a long time. And my 64GB Memory Core i7 Mac Mini arrives tomorrow. I think I'll place it atop the Indy :)

Last night, I remembered omelette's. I was at one client site on and off for something like six years across two accounts. And there was this man, Richard. He was the short-order cook. Came in every morning early, and hand chopped all the vegetables and meats, and hand broke and whipped the eggs. He was a great man. Every morning, on and off for something like six years, he would make me an omelette for breakfast. He would put a little oil on the griddle and spread it out. While it was heating he would grab a styrofoam plate and pile upon it diced green peppers, crumbled bacon & sausage, sliced black olives, chopped tomato, diced onion & ham, and of course, sliced jalepenos. Once these ingredients were gathered, he'd put it on the oil, mix it up a bit, and move it to the side. With this a little more oil he'd spread out with his spatula and a ladlefull of whipped eggs atop it. As the egg bubbled, he'd gather up a nice portion of shredded cheese and cover the egg while turning the other ingredients on the grill. The smell alone...wow. I used to wait with gleeful anticipation of it all coming together. He'd fill the egg with three-quarters of the mixture and deftly fold it over itself before placing it on a plate and then topping the creation with the last quarter of ingredients from the grill, and topping that again with cheese. Now, this wasn't my favorite part. My favorite part was topping the omelette with the fresh cream gravy made every morning. This would melt the cheese atop the omelette, and I would lastly pour a healthy portion of Cholula on the gravy. These are my fondest memories of Richard, the short-order cook. Nowadays, I go to IHOP for a ham & cheese and an order of gravy on the side. It's not Richard's omelette, and I've tried to make them myself the way he could, and have failed. At least IHOP keeps Cholula on the table. Richard retired six months ago. You will be missed sir.

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In concluding the first segment of this missive, and understanding that some of my readers may not have been familiar with Cholula, I chose to provide a link to my hot-sauce of choice. This isn't your boring Louisiana cayenne & vinegar hot sauce. This is the real-deal. Anyway, in linking it, I found myself on their web page and realized that I'd never been there before. This in and of itself wasn't exciting, but the discovery of new Cholula seasonings in three flavors was VERY exciting. I immeditely tried to purchase a case online, but couldn't find the 'sample pack' of them, that is, two of each of the flavors. All they sell is a case of six of any one flavor. Spying the contact number on the sidebar (a damn rare thing these days) I reached for the batphone and made the call. A very pleasent-sounding lady answered and after explaining my dilemna, she said, "What's your name?" I told her. "Are you going to put in an online order right now?" YES! YES! YES! "Ok, I'll flag the order when it comes in and make you a sample pack to ship out." Woo-hoo! Now, shipping is fully one-third the cost of the case, but hey, it's Cholula!

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Couple years ago some doctors came onto the Oprah show to talk about their new breakout book, YOU: The Owners Manual. They said some radical things and explained things with their enthusiam and visual aids that really stuck a chord with America and made a personal difference in my life. Yesterday, they were on Oprah again, and once again, another breakthrough book which my wife had purchased yesterday, the day it was released, YOU: On A Diet (Waist Management) and Oprah couldn't say enough fascinating things about it, and the doctors. "They have unlocked the secret to weight-loss and a healthy lifestyle," she said. I then heard her say, "America needs to know this!" Everyone was very excited. I was very excited. The show begins. It had the same amount of enthusiam and visual aids as the last time. A lot of information, a lot of excitement. The show concludes. Now, I want to save you a little money, as I have the book, will read it, and I did watch the show (there's a follow-up on Discovery Health tonight at 2200). I will tell you what the secret is, according to these two outstanding doctors:

• Eat a healthy diet.


• Exercise.

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I made an appointment to get an oil change this morning, as they were too busy last night. They promised me it wouldn't take more than half an hour. It took an hour. I perused the selection of magazines and finally settled on 'Ebony' as it was the most interesting magazine there. There was a lot of talk of politics, and a special on Jesse Jackson. There was a quote in there I agreed with (by none other than Al Sharpton believe it or not) who suggested that the young don't see it, but those who are older can appreciate what he's done. Now I'm under no illusions that they weren't expecting a white Texan to be reading their magazine, but I found myself in that catagory. And I know my father would tell me that if you do enough stuff, you're bound to do something right every now and again on accident, and that a couple of good acts don't erase a lifetime of liberalism, but I used to despise the man. That is, until he started bringing our captured soldiers back from all over the world. I really respect that.

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Bill gave me his SGI Octane. I'm pretty excited, though I have NO IDEA what I'm going to do with it yet. In fact, I shudder to think of doing something with it before I get my SPARC box back up. Had a nice chat with unixwolf who also found my Sun rack. It was a good chat. Have a great weekend everyone!