Author Archives: Garrett Wollman

End of the new-car hunt

Posted on 2013-12-08

At the end of the last month, I had to replace my eighth-generation Honda Accord V6, which was coming off lease on December 6. I had narrowed the choices down to two hybrids with very similar technology, the brand-new Accord … Continue reading →

Posted in Transportation | Tagged , , , , ,

Markets and other human institutions (quotation)

Posted on 2013-12-01

I thought the following quotation from Cosma Shalizi, one of my favorites, seemed appropriate in light of my previous post on Evangelii Gaudium: There is a fundamental level at which Marx’s nightmare vision is right: capitalism, the market system, whatever … Continue reading →

Quote | Posted on 2013-12-01 | Tagged , ,

Some thoughts from a nonbeliever on Evangelii Gaudium

Posted on 2013-11-30

One of the big bits of international news this week was the release by the Roman Catholic Church of Pope Francis’s first major official statement, Evangelii Gaudium (translated in English as “The Joy of the Gospel”). This “apostolic exhortation” set … Continue reading →

Posted in Books, Law & Society | Tagged ,

On misrepresenting IQ

There’s been a lot of talk in my Twitter timeline about Boris Johnson and IQ lately. Apparently the Mayor of London thinks that some people really are more worthy than others. This controversy spilled over into the comments of a … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2013-11-29 | Tagged ,

Thanksgiving menu: results

Posted on 2013-11-29

No, I’m not going to post photos of everything we ate at Thanksgiving dinner, since I didn’t take any. But I do want to report on how things turned out (see previous post: “Menu planning for Thanksgiving“). First off, it … Continue reading →

Posted in Food | Tagged

Playlist serendipity

On Twitter just now, I noted “Sometimes it feels like an inspired segue, but I know it’s really only the output of a pseudorandom number generator.” Here’s what I was hearing: Patty Larkin, “Hotel Monte Vista” (Regrooving the Dream) Bruce … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2013-11-22 | Tagged

Menu planning for Thanksgiving

Posted on 2013-11-16

Two Thursdays from now is probably the last Thanksgiving in a while that I will drive down to my parents’ house and take the lead in preparing the big family meal. Once they move away, I’ll either be flying out … Continue reading →

Posted in Food | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

LISA’13 recap

Posted on 2013-11-13

The first week in November I went to the 2013 Large Installation System Administration conference, one of the Usenix Association‘s two annual flagship conferences (the other being the summer Annual Technical Conference, which is part of what they call “Federated … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing | Tagged , , , , , , ,

An addendum to the findslowdisks DTrace hack

In the previous installment, I posted a script that will output a series of lines that look like this: multipath/s33d7: 417.3 ms > 372.9 ms multipath/s25d22: 682.9 ms > 372.9 ms multipath/s29d5: 699.2 ms > 372.9 ms multipath/s25d4: 1449.1 ms … Continue reading →

Aside | Posted on 2013-10-31 | Tagged , , ,

My first (well, ok, third) DTrace hack

Posted on 2013-10-29

We have a storage server with a bunch of marginal disks in it. They aren’t bad enough to return read errors, and of course the SMART data claims they’re just fine, but the built-in error-recovery takes much too long (sometimes … Continue reading →

Posted in Computing, FreeBSD | Tagged , ,