Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

I've known I was going to be writing this post for about 6 months now, and not looking forward to it. I learned yesterday evening that my old friend, debating partner, guitar playing buddy Allen Patterson - AKA, the Whited Sepulchre - has gone to that place where we all eventually go. Allen was diagnosed with a brain tumor about 6 months ago. After the initial shock, he dealt with it with his usual blend of wit and mockery. We should all face death with such an attitude. One of the things that as I get older I find I dislike about Facebook is that you learn all sorts of life-changing news there scattered among the cat videos and Candy Crush ads. So it was that I first that Allen had passed - on Facebook. He might have been delighted -  he regularly delighted in turning around people's perceptions of  the "proper" way of doing things. I knew the diagnosis was terminal, but I wasn't ready for him to leave us, dammit. I last saw him at a celebration of h

PaaS stands for "Platform as a Service;" it's one of several classes of cloud computing services. Compare this to Iaas (Infrastructure as a Service), SaaS (Software as a Service), DBaas (Database as a Service) and CFaaS (cluster...well you get the idea). Here's an update on some PaaS services that have free (as in no money) tiers. I've left off any that are free trial periods. It's annoying to have to keep checking the calendar.  I'm also averse to listing any that require a credit card to get into the door. This list was thrown together quickly, mostly so I didn't have to bookmark all these and remember the details. I went over some of these when I wrote about cloud services in general  last year.  And now, in no particular order.... https://www.openshift.com My current favorite. You can run up to 3 small applications (they call them "gears") for nothing, nada, zip. You can even set up a custom domain. How cool is that?  T

I just learned today that my old friend and occasional debating partner, The Whited Sepulchre  has been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor of some type, and is scheduled to undergo brain surgery on Friday. From what he and others have said on Facebook (I hate that Facebook is now a venue for this sort of thing) the prognosis isn't particularly rosy, but I refuse to reflect on what that could mean. I saw him last Sunday after church from across the sanctuary; I hadn't seen him there in quite some time so I pushed through the exiting throng to say hello. It struck me at the time that he didn't seem quite himself...a little more subdued than usual. He mentioned a writing project he was thinking about starting then we agreed that we needed to get together and do some pickin' and grinnin' again in the near future and then parted. Today I saw a friend post something about his upcoming surgery and I was struck dumb. We didn't always agree (read: rarely)  but we alw

Well, it's been a while. Life here at Sisyphean Corp has always been a grind, but in the past it always had a modicum of amusement value, as well as the opportunity to do slightly interesting things with the support of a string of pretty good supervisors. I worked hard and had fun. That changed about a year ago. January 2, 2014, I had a new boss. It didn't take me long to figure out the good times were over. My second or third one-on-one meeting she said, "I'm not sure I understand exactly what you do, but you seem to have a lot less on your plate than everyone else." It's gone downhill from from there. It occurred to me the best way for her to find out what I did was to quit, but I need the money. So last year was pretty depressing. I'll spare you the boring details but I've been in a bit of a funk, to the point where I've rarely felt like writing. Why depress you, too? I did talk to a couple of recruiters, and even flew to Seattle for an intervie